Читать книгу One Game at a Time. Why Sports Matter онлайн

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Twenty-six sports will be played … with medals awarded in three hundred and two events. The majority of those medals will be given in sports that originated, in their modern form, in Britain: archery, athletics (track and field), boxing, badminton, field hockey, football (soccer), rowing, sailing, swimming, water polo, table tennis, and tennis. Britain is also the birthplace of curling, cross-country, cricket, croquet, golf, squash, and rugby—which is scheduled to become an Olympic sport in 2016. No other country comes close. Three Olympic sports originated in the United States: basketball, volleyball, and the triathlon, which was invented in 1974. Two originated in Germany: handball and gymnastics.ssss1

It’s not too much of a stretch to think of modern sports (Olympic and otherwise) as the (spectacularly) monetized performance and promulgation of empire.

This is essentially true of most contemporary sports. Certain competitions seem to be timeless: who can run the fastest, lift the heaviest thing, walk the furthest along a log, etc. But what turns games into sports is standardization so that people can compete against one another using common measurements. Throwing a stick as far as you can is a game, but it’s the sport of javelin when the field and stick are standardized. The invention, regulation, and bureaucratization of specific games as sport, however, has not happened willy-nilly or outside political and cultural contexts: the definitions, regulation, discipline, dissemination, and uses of sport have often been bent to racialist and heteronormative, masculine ends. Asking why sports are so militaristically designed, or why speed and strength are valued so much as opposed to say, rhythm and balance, is something like asking why colonialists have felt compelled to impose their wills and worldviews on the rest of the globe.