Athletics of To-Day 1929

The Growth of Modern Athletics 31 In Sweden there is a meeting which must be unique of its kind. This is the Swedish Schoolboys' Athletic Week, during which championships are decided annually in Stockholm. France, of course, has established a Ministry of Sport, and in Germany, Hungary, and many other countries the progress of the schoolboys is carefully planned and as carefully watched and assisted. In Scotland and the Dominions Overseas Inter-Scholastic Championships have been long in vogue. In England athletic matches have been held between certain schools for a number of years, and we have the Public Schools Challenge Cup Meeting, promoted each spring by the L.A.C., which serves really as a Public Schools Championship Meeting, the Public Schools Cross-Country Race, promoted by the Ranelagh Harriers, and the Public Schools Relay Meet, held under the auspices of the Achilles lub. In 1925 there was founded through the help of the Daily Express the Schools Athletic Association, of which H.R.H. The Duke of York is President. The primary objects of the S.A.A. are the physical, mental, and moral training of boys and girls at the elementary schools. The association, which is growing steadily, holds a huge championship meeting each year, and in 1928 there were affiliated to the S.A.A. some twenty-five counties, representing a constituency of three or four hundred thousand children of both sexes. Another great factor for our future progress is to be found in the system, institut d by the Bedfordshire A.A.A. in 1927, of promoting ounty Junior and olts hampionships for boys under seventeen and under fourteen years of age resp ctively. The Public chools Challenge Cup Meeting, which justly should be styled the Public chools Athletic hampionship Meeting, was not the product of any sudden inspiration, but is rather the logical outcome of a perfectly natural process of evolution. In 1890, Mr. . H. Mason, L.A.C., who won the English One Mile hampionship of 1872, presented to the club a quarter mile challenge cup to be competed for annually by Public School boys. In 1896 two further cups were presented,