Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

322 Track Athletics scores of their fellow-collegians. And that the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge are better at the long distances than those of Har– vard and Yale has been only too vividly demon- ·strated on the several international occasions when these young gentlemen have had the pleasure of meeting. The most plausible explanation of the average superiority of Englishmen at the long distances is the big fact that outdoor sport has been for generations, and to a considerable body of the people, a real and vital thing in a sense that we do not as yet understand it here. Sport has long been a habit there; with us it has not yet quite ceased to be a fad. Distance running requires endurance rather than speed, and endurance is not acquired in a month or in a year. If it makes a difference in the way a race-horse answers the question which the jockey puts to him in the stretch, whether or not his grandsire won the Suburban, so should it make a differ– ence in the last fifty yards of a mile run whether or not a man's father rowed in his college eight and a man's grandfather followed the hounds at three-score-and-ten. And if the battles of the Iron Duke were won on the football fields of the English schools, so, one fancies, is the mile or two-mile run of to-day's international meet won in the paper-chases of Rugby and Eton. The