'Cells or soaring?': Historical reflectons on 'visions' of body, athletics, and Modern Olympism
Titel:
'Cells or soaring?': Historical reflectons on 'visions' of body, athletics, and Modern Olympism
Auteur:
Park, Roberta J.
Verschenen in:
The international journal of the history of sport
Paginering:
Jaargang 24 (2007) nr. 12 pagina's 1701-1723
Jaar:
2007-12
Inhoud:
In 1996 Life Magazine produced a special issue dedicated to the Atlanta Olympic games that contained photographs of mesomorphic males and females and the message: by means of intense training Olympic athletes have reached the limits of human endurance and attained 'the skills and muscles that effect a transformation from mortal to machine'. 'Mortal into machine' is quite a different 'vision' than the one Pierre de Coubertin aspired to in creating the modern Olympic games. Different, yet co-existing views of athletes appear in scores of publications such as The Olympic Book of Sports Medicine (1984), which contains photographs of graceful skaters and of runners 'soaring' over hurdles that are interspersed with schematic representations of myofibrils, axons and motor neurons. By 1887, when the young de Coubertin began his 'campaign of 21 years', experimental physiology and other biological sciences were on their way to becoming established disciplines and earlier ways of viewing the body that were grounded in external form were being challenged by mechanistic approaches that delved ever deeper into the body's structures and functions. In 1865 Adolf Fick and Johannes Wislicenus had used a mountain ascent to test German chemist Justus von Liebig's theory of metabolism. Nitrogen balance, cardiac function and other studies of men engaged in a variety of athletic performances soon followed. Writings about 'the physiology of exercise' followed two paths: (a) journal articles and monographs such as George Kolb's Beitrage zur Physiologie maximaler Muskelarbeit besonders des modernen Sports (1887) - translated into English as Physiology of Sport (1893); and (b) books such as Fernand Lagrange's Physiology des Exercises du Corps (1888), which is substantially a hygiene text. These differing orientations were fully evident at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, where the Federation Internationale de Medicine Sportive's gathering focused upon physiological and other investigations of participating athletes. The separate international congress organized by the Dutch Society for Physical Education was planned to include much broader participation. [ 1 ]
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