The New Year brings a new recruit to the social science team at the BL: namely Simone Bacchini, a socio-linguist whose PhD research centres on ‘the linguistic encoding and discursive representation of the experiences of physical pain and illness’. Simone will be working in the fields of sociology, culture, media and sport and is already researching an article for the Sport and Society website. He will be looking at the discourse of and around the Paralympic Games and identifying materials held in the Library’s collections which facilitate research into this, and similar subjects.

 The sports controversy du jour has stimulated much discussion about sport discourse, and how influential individuals like sports commentators can colour the way their audiences view people and events. Commentators have to be vigilant about how they express themselves (both on and off air!), and this is particularly the case with potentially sensitive issues around sport and gender, sport and race, and sport and disability. My feeling is that we are at a very crucial (i.e., formative) stage in the evolution of popular perceptions about the Paralympics and about elite disability sport in general so it is essential that we get it right at London 2012.

 There is no denying that the language we use and the ways we express it have an effect in creating positive (or negative) climates of opinion. The psychology of this is well known by athletes of all kinds – elites and amateurs alike, because competing is all about motivation and self belief, about positive affirmation and constructive criticism; hence the use of empowering language and visualisation by athletes and coaches, in order to create a state of mind which encourages excellence.

 What comes first though, the state of mind or the language? I’m all in favour of using language as a spur to change things, asserting the premise that if you use the right terms, the right behaviour will follow. A fascinating book in the collections goes into this issue from a gender perspective, exploring image, rhetoric and commentary in women’s sport. I recommend it:

 Sport, rhetoric and gender: historical perspectives and media representations edited by Linda K Fuller. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

London reference collections shelfmark: YC.2012.a.6981

Lending collections shelfmark: m06/40365

Andrea Bertorelli writes:

 With the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games over a year away, questions about the legacy of the Olympic Stadium have suddenly taken centre stage. Will the venue become the new home of West Ham United or Tottenham Hotspur football clubs?

 The controversy hinges on the athletics track. West Ham pledge to keep it; Tottenham want to demolish the whole stadium and replace it with a sixty thousand-seater purposely built for football (and with no athletics facility). In return, the Spurs promise the investment of a considerable amount of money to rebuild the athletics stadium at Crystal Palace and set up an “athletics legacy” fund.

Not unnaturally, all the stake holders have been campaigning hard, arousing considerable media interest. To dismantle a stadium costing £547 million sounds madness. However, an article published in the Guardian suggests that doing this would benefit the athletics community in the long run: (http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/jan/16/olympic-stadium-tottenham-west-ham)

The spectre that inevitably haunts the Olympic authorities is that the London Olympic stadium will join a long list of “white elephant stadiums” (c.f. Montreal, Atlanta and South Africa) which have been used for a single event and then abandoned. It's not a good look for the Olympic and Paralympic Games movement.

An upsurge in interest in athletics after the Games may well require a huge facility, but is this a feasible proposition? Research is going on already into this aspect of the Olympics legacy and the debate is set to run and run. I invite you to read and click on the links below and engage with the controversy:

 Journals:

 Roult, R and Lefebvre S. ‘Planning and Reconversion of Olympic Heritages: The Montreal Olympic Stadium’ in International Journal of the History of Sport Nov/Dec2010, Vol. 27 Issue 16-18, p2731 17p.

Lending collections shelfmark : 4542.282000

 Adler, D. ‘Parisian Delight’ in Panstadia International Quarterly Report Apr 2004: Vol. 10 Issue 4. p. 44-46;48-49 5p.

Lending collections shelfmark: 6357.476500

 Links:

 Tottenham hit back at critics over plans to move to Olympic Park: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/tottenham-hotspur/8263280/Tottenham-hit-back-at-critics-over-plans-to-move-to-Olympic-Park.html

 Mike Lee: Only Spurs can stop Olympic Stadium becoming a white elephant: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/jan/16/mike-lee-olympic-stadium-white-elephant

Tottenham bid for Olympic Stadium 'makes sense long term', say AEG: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/oct/05/spurs-olympic-stadium-aeg-bid

West Ham and Tottenham's 2012 stadium plans criticised: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/olympic_games/london_2012/9366610.stm

South Africa's World Cup venues are 'white elephants': http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/south-africas-world-cup-venues-are-white-elephants-1840958.html

'White elephant' stadium will drain public cash years after Olympics: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/olympics/article5705047.ece

 

 

Tuesday 11^th January saw a really fascinating event held in the British Library. Hosted by the British Sociological Association’s Sociology of Sport and Leisure and Recreation study groups it attracted an audience of eager participants from across the HE sector and some starry names from the world of sport research. The conference was about the Olympic Games and the social science issues it raises and there were four sessions  which looked at mega events, the history of ‘Olympic’ designated festivals, modern European identity vis a vis the Games, the popularity of the Olympics, and the status of the athlete within the event itself. The latter, which took the form of a round table discussion featuring Professor Barrie Houlihan, and Drs Elizabeth Pike and Dominic Malcolm was particularly intriguing because it posed a number of questions about the role the elite athletes actually play as part of this most monumental of mega events. It was suggested that although the Olympics and Paralympics could not happen without the athletes, beside the bureaucratic juggernaut of the Games and the economic, political and logistical issues it brings with it, they seem almost marginalised, caught up in a net of rules and regulations which define their eligibility, their validity (as drug-free competitors) and their actions.

 Another interesting issue that was raised was that of drug testing and the minute arrangements which athletes have to submit to in order to ensure that they are drug-free. As biological techniques – the drugs themselves, genetic engineering and so on- become more and more sophisticated, we have to ask ourselves how far we are prepared to go to regulate elite athletes’ lives to ensure that they are ‘clean’. Complicated issues like these can become too problematic to be resolved, and it occurred to me, while listening to the debate, that thirty years ago we would have been discussing ‘amateurism’ and how to police it. In 1988 the IOC dropped the regulation that Olympians must be ‘amateurs’ because the situation had grown much too complicated, with the advent of government sponsorship of athletes. So will the drugs issue have to be dropped some day as being too difficult to police. Interesting!

 

New  year; new section on the Sport & Society website. As blogged on the seventh of December, we now have a history section (http://bit.ly/hUr6ER) with an inaugural article on William Penny Brookes and the Much Wenlock games by Steph Doehler who completed her MA in Sport History & Culture at De Montfort University last year. Steph tells me that she did an enormous amount of research for this article (which is part of a much longer piece of work which she did for her MA dissertation). Her bibliography, which appears at the end of her article, shows how many primary sources she had to use, many of which were in the Much Wenlock archive held in the Mayor of Wenlock’s office. As she says, not surprisingly: “it took a lot of organisation to access the archives!”

 Popular and ubiquitous as sport is, accessing the research resources you need is not always straightforward. Sport and its institutions are fragmented, and there are numerous possible locations for sports resources like minutes of meetings, programmes, records, statistics and so on. Some organisations and individuals will have been assiduous in keeping things, or passing them on to other repositories; others not. So a sports historian often has major difficulties in identifying and then getting hold of the materials that he or she needs. Even in institutions like the BL there is many a slip betwixt cup and lip! In May 1941 a number of incendiary bombs fell on the South West Quadrant of the British Museum Library. The subsequent fire, and the water used to extinguish it, destroyed over 100,000 books in the library stack area affected. Among these were books with shelfmarks in the 7000 series, which included some of the Library’s earliest books on sport, most of which had been obtained through the legal deposit provisions. Many of the destroyed volumes have since been replaced by microfilms of copies from other libraries, but it just goes to show the frustrations that can await the unwary researcher.

Last week, some good news was revealed for the Haymarket Media Group – namely that LOCOG has awarded it the contract for the printing and production of the official programmes for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. LOCOG says that some 2.5 million programmes will be on sale, and that they will include contributions from ‘top sports writers from all over the world’. Chris Townsend -LOCOG’s Commercial Director – sounds the right note when he suggests that “official programmes are a feature of many sporting events – and the Olympic and Paralympic Games are no different. In generations to come they will be valued”

 They will certainly be valued by researchers. Ephemera become increasingly useful as the years go by because programmes, posters, flyers – whatever - capture their moment so evocatively, and tell us a lot – both directly and indirectly - about the great occasion. Collectors know, too, that it’s necessary to grab your copies while you can. Ephemeral publications, by definition, are not around for ever: if you’re not on the ball when they appear, you may miss out completely.

 The British Museum Library (the BL’s hallowed predecessor) did not set out to systematically collect events programmes. Nevertheless, by various serendipitous (and in some cases deliberate) means it managed to acquire some fascinating collections of such materials. We have, for example, the Evanion collection which shines a (colourful) light on Victorian popular entertainment; we have a number of theatre and concert programmes, and also – from a sports perspective, an interesting collection of British football programmes, dating back as far as the 1890s. Details of these are given on the Newspaper Library’s web pages http://bit.ly/e3eb2v

 

The exigencies of popular forms of publishing today have meant that curators and librarians have had to re-define, and keep a sharp eye on – what’s happening in the world of ephemera. The big news is about electronic forms of this material: websites, tweets, social networking communications, electronic fanzines and so on have all entered the lists as important research resources which must be acquired while they are – sometimes fleetingly - available.

 News of these Olympic programmes is therefore important to us, and we’ll be making sure that we acquire copies of these, as well as other Olympics-related ephemera.

There’s no getting away from history, or at least that’s what I’ve deduced from creating the Olympics website. It’s supposed to be a take on the Olympics ‘through the lens of social science’ but most of the sports researchers I know are taking a quick squint at it through a pair of binoculars as well: historical ones.

 When I was at University studying for my history degree there was much discussion about what ‘history’ actually was, and later when I was doing postgraduate research this question evolved into whether history was a social science or not. I always maintained it was, particularly as LSE - where I was studying - had a history course; the BL though, has always tended to treat it as an arts and humanities subject. 

 Which brings me to a plea to break down the barriers where subject disciplines are concerned. It’s happening already in any case, with academics adopting different methodologies in their disciplines and borrowing from others. In sport they seem to happily bounce from one to another, as the past says a lot about the present – simply by the way in which it says it.

 Which all adds up to this announcement: that I’m working on adding some historical content to the Olympics website. It finds its way in anyhow, and there seems no sense in not acknowledging this, particularly as the BL has some wonderful archive resources on sport. We also have several fascinating historical contributions to add to the website soon, including some information about the predecessors of the modern Olympic Games.

 Not apropos of which, I’m totally ecstatic that England have won the 2^nd Ashes Test match in Australia. Well done, Boys!

Carr, Edward Hallett, What is History? The George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge, January-March, 1961. Macmillan & Co: London; St. Martin's Press: New York, 1961.

London reference collections: 9526.bb.22.

Lending collections shelfmark: T18840

Bullock, Alan, Is history becoming a social science?: the case of contemporary history Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1977.

London reference collections: X.709/31728

Lending collections shelfmark: 1976 5183.800000

 

The controversy over government funding of youth sport continues, but the pumping in of cash alone won’t inevitably ensure success when it comes to getting kids moving. I started to enjoy sport rather late in life, and if I have any regrets, the main one is that I didn’t get active sooner; but what was lacking in the early days was not opportunity but inspiration - the vital difference between having to do something, and wanting to do it. This makes the Olympics, and indeed any mega sporting event, an ideal opportunity to change the way people – and especially impressionable youngsters - think about physical activity. The drama of the situation, the excitement, the buzz; this puts a spin on physical exercise which makes it a more enticing prospect than dire warnings about obesity, or a compulsory PE lesson on a cold Monday morning.

The effects of seeing a sporting drama unfold have an inevitability about them: look at the take up of tennis courts after Wimbledon fortnight; the Olga Korbut effect on the gymnastics ambitions of young girls. In short, the flight of the imagination has to take place before people feel the urge to take up something that is often hard, demanding and uncomfortable (as physical exercise is, there’s no denying it) and win through to the rewards – self esteem, fitness, joy (which physical exercise brings, there’s no denying that either).

What puts spin on the need to do exercise? I suggest: to watch sport in action; to listen to sportspeople talking; to read about it the experiences of those who do it, high and low. There are lots of books out there about the sporting achievements of ordinary and extraordinary people. I’ve been fascinated, and inspired by, the following:

Taylor, Russell. The looniness of the long distance runner: an unfit Londoner's attempt to run the New York City Marathon from scratch

London: Andre Deutsch, 2001.

London reference collections shelfmark: YK.2003.a.5380

Grey-Thompson, Tanni, Aim high

Bedlinog: Accent, 2007

London reference collections shelfmark: YC.2007.a.8674

Hines, Mark,

The Marathon des sables: seven days in the Sahara: enduring the toughest footrace on earth

London: Health Body Publishing, c2007

London reference collections shelfmark: YK.2009.a.19238

McDougall, Christopher.

Born to run: the hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen

London: Profile, 2009

London reference collections shelfmark: YK.2010.a.16168

There’s much excitement here about the BL’s new exhibition ‘Evolving English’ which opens on the 12^th November and which has already garnered a huge amount of publicity. A variety of events around the theme of language have also been organised, and the one that really interests me is ‘Over the moon: the language of sport’ which is scheduled for the evening of January 11 2011 (details below)

The problem is: how will the panel participants (a starry cast) cram in everything there is to say about the language of sport, which to my mind encompasses all sorts of things from the way sport is described to the words, clichés, metaphors and similes which we all know and love? If we’re talking evolution, it’s fascinating to look at fashions in sports terminology and how this has ebbed and flowed over time. Footballers were notoriously over the moon in the eighties and nineties. They don’t say it now; so what has taken its place? Centre forwards aren’t doing  jinking runs any more (a description much beloved of sports journalists in the seventies) and at last sports broadcasters have dropped the distinction they usually made between men and girl athletes (terminology dating, I imagine, from time immemorial) which has to be good because it always used to send my blood pressure sky high.

 Sport has always had a predilection for ‘in words’ used by the cognoscenti. Here’s Pierce Egan writing in 1812 about the boxing match between ‘Jemmy the postman’ and Jack Lamb: ‘It was a complete mill on both sides, and after a hammering of near fifty minutes, they both agreed to sheer off!” You don’t hear milling coves saying that sort of thing these days.

 Some words I love and haven’t encountered very frequently in the sports context.  Geoff Boycott often describes a cricketer as bamboozled when he’s misread the pitch of the ball which is both funny and evocative, but cricket abounds with words that paint a picture (maybe because of the celebrated commentaries on Test Match Special) he’s skyed it; a daisy cutter, a tail-ender. Some of these words have found their way into common parlance. Where would we be these days without ‘well that’s got him on the back foot!’

 Event: The language of sport

http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events/event116162.html

 

Pierce Egan

Boxiana: or sketches of ancient and modern pugilism…

London: G Smeeton, 1812

X629/3882