Why? The Science of Athletics

THE BUILD OF THE ATHLETE s6g six pounds in weight above the average of the ordinary man of to-day. Chest and arms were found to be above the average .Jin girth, but while the circumference of arms and legs was above the ordinary, the wrists and ankles were peculiarly slim. In other words, the modern sprinter is light in bone but heavy in muscle. Tait McKenzie followed the production of "The Sprinter" by the creation of "The Athlete" (Figs. I 20 and I 2 I), a wonderful statue which will preserve the ideals of the twentieth century as long as the works of Lysippus, Polyclitus, Phidias and Myron have maintained the ancient Greek conceptions of perfect manhood. When the Society of Directors of Physical Education, U.S.A., commissioned Tait McKenzie to produce a statue showing the ideal build of the modern all-round athlete they provided him with charts of the measurements of University athletes that had been compiled by Dr. Dudley Sargent during a period of forty years. The length of time devoted to the collection of essential statistics was a saf~guard against the risk of a merely ephemeral fashion, for it was realized that the ideal type of an era must depend largely upon the existing conditions. Thus, the struggles of the sixth century B.C. against barbarism pro– duced the tremendous Herculean ideal, whereas the less warlike fifth century B.C. was represented by an almost purely athletic conception of manhood, which excelled in the five events of the Olympic Pentathlon and was por– trayed by the Apoxyomenos of Lysippus. This figure, of an athlete scraping oil from his limbs with a strigil, is wonderfully graceful, of more slender build than the Hercules, or the Doryphoros, and possessing a smaller head and a shorter body, with proportionately longer legs. Even before Dr. Sargent's statistics were fully exam– ined, it was '·fipparent that the modern type would conform more closely to the Apoxyomenos than to the Hercules. Let us be clear on one point. The Hercules repre– sented the age of pure strength ; the Doryphoros of Polyclitus, dating from the early fifth century B.c., marks AA