Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

CHAPTER II THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN TRACK ATHLETICS OuR English cousins had learned to run and had held organized track games many years before we went in seriously for track athletics. Early in the fifties athletic clubs were formed at Oxford and at Cambridge, and in r857 the colleges of the latter universities met in the first intercollegiate contest. Those were days when the young men of America needed no mimic strug– gles in which to develop their manly virtues, when a sterner game was being played than that of the field or track. It was in r 860 that the Oxonians held their first intercollegiate sports, and four years later, twelve years before our Intercollegiate Athletic Association was formed, the wearers of the light blue and the dark met in the first dual meet in Christ Church Cricket Ground, almost at the same time that our armies were fighting the fight of the Wilderness and Sherman was march– ing to the sea. Sport, as it exists to-day in America, that is to say what we may call "polite sport," was then a thing unknown. The athletic girl was then as 251