Page 35 - Sport Culture and the Media

16 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

healthy physical activity and to discharge ‘unhealthy’ urges among the citizenry.
It was this line of moral thought that led, somewhat bizarrely, to the
staging from 1850 of the ‘Olympian Games’ in the small English town of Much
Wenlock, Shropshire. The Games’ founder, Dr William Penny Brookes (who
developed a close association with Baron de Coubertin), was strongly in favour
of school physical education (especially in state-supported, non-fee-paying
institutions) and believed that farm labourers (whose work under more
intensive farming methods was becoming as rigidly prescribed as that of their
industrial counterparts) should be given compulsory physical training. In
extolling the virtues of outdoor exercise, he observed that ‘true manliness
shows itself not merely in skill and field sports, but in the exercise of those
moral virtues which it is one of the objects of religion to inculcate’ (quoted in
Hill 1992: 10). Hence, through compulsory physical education and sport in
state schools, and the imposition of more rigid rules governing sports like
boxing, cricket and football outside it, elite and religious groups believed that
they could maintain discipline within the working class.
The fear that the ‘idle’ leisure of the ‘common man’ would lead to physical
degeneracy, a weakened kingdom unable to defend itself (or to attack and
colonize others), and a debauched nation sapped of moral fibre, spread in
the nineteenth century to the young men of the ‘officer’ class. For example,
Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby (an English ‘public’, which is to say
private, fee-paying) School, famously advocated sport as a means of promoting
discipline, cooperation, leadership and ‘purity’. As Clarke and Critcher note:
The encouragement of organized sport was simultaneously a means of
controlling the characteristically anarchic behaviour of public schoolboys
and of redirecting the public school ethos towards a model of what would
subsequently be defined as ‘muscular Christianity’. Thus both the tradi-
tional clientele of the aristocracy and the new market of the sons of the
bourgeoisie could be retained for the public schools, refurbishing an image
tarnished by low morality and dubious academic accomplishment.
(Clarke and Critcher 1985: 62)

Baron Pierre de Coubertin was much taken with this ‘healthy body, healthy
mind’ aspect of sport and by the noble idea that, while excelling at sport
would make the citizenry more able to wage war effectively (France, after all,
had suffered an ignominious recent defeat in the Franco-Prussian War), meeting
other physically and morally fit young people from all over the world in inter-
national sporting competition every four years would enhance international
understanding and make actual military combat less likely. This residual notion
of a pax Olympia was highly visible during the Winter Olympics in Nagano,
Japan, in February 1998, when the then President of the International Olympic