The good, the bad and the ugly

Prof. Peter F. Radford

Brunel University, UK

The birth, at the end of the 20th century, of an on-line sport sociology journal is an irresistible temptation to look back along the road that sport and the sport sciences have already travelled together, and to pause and contemplate the way ahead.

Sport science seems to have emerged into a recognisable form about 200 years ago. In the summer of 1801, for example, an aspiring, but largely unsuccessful, 21-year-old athlete by the name of Robert Barclay-Allardice, was preparing for a major competition with a lot of money at stake. He approached old Jackie Smith in Yorkshire, who was "very knowing in all sporting science": we have no difficulty recognising the scenario. Nor should we have too much difficulty recognising what Jackie Smith knew and did. He knew all about physiological loading and about cross-training. He knew how to peak an athlete's performance so that he was at his best on the right day. He knew the details of developing strength and aerobic endurance. He was an expert on diet and fluid intake, and he knew how to monitor his athlete's performance. He was even up-to-date on how to use chemical substances in athletes' preparation. Of course, he did not do the same things with and to his athlete that we do, nor did he use the same jargon; we draw from different reservoirs of knowledge and use different words, but the process is instantly recognisable.

In some ways, it is tempting to look at Jackie Smith more as a trainer than a sport scientist, but he was clearly much more than that. He was selected because, unlike many of the other trainers, Jackie Smith had 'scientific' knowledge, but perhaps 200 years ago the best trainers were also sport scientists and vice versa. It might be argued that unlike modern 'scientists' Jackie Smith only applied knowledge and did not create anything new, but even this may well be underestimating him. In 1806 for example, when Sir John Sinclair conducted the first survey of coaching and training methods for sport in Britain, he came to the conclusion that trainers such as Jackie Smith had created new knowledge, and that those in other walks of life, such as medicine, should pay more attention to it.

Interestingly, it was not the physiology, the nutrition nor the chemistry in his methods which attracted most attention in 1801, it was all probably old-hat to every-one-in-the-know even then. No, what prompted a letter to The Times was the way that Jackie Smith ordered his young athlete about "just as if he had been a spaniel". For Robert Barclay-Allardice was a young gentleman and Jackie Smith wasn't. Even 200 years ago one of the features of the sport sciences was the way their practitioners crossed the accepted social lines and did things in sport that elsewhere in society people were not ready for. This was a tendency both laudable and dangerous; for scientists, and the way they have used their knowledge and influence in sport over the last 200 years, have given us a lot to be proud of, but there has been much else besides.

Sport science seems to have become progressively more difficult to define as the number of university departments studying it increases, so perhaps we should turn to the athletes to give us a clearer focus. From my experience, the athletes have a very simple expectation, they look to the sport sciences for performance enhancement, particularly their own, and when they are injured they expect it to treat them and put them back in competition as quickly as possible.

As far as the sport scientists are concerned, they would claim that their interest and expertise extend to all aspects of competitive sport and of sportsmen and sportswomen - their identification, development, preparation, competition and recovery, their physical environment, facilities and equipment. They would also consider the athletes' social environment, including their immediate entourage, and the broader social and political setting in which they live and compete. And they may include in their catalogue of the sport science family, the biological sciences, the natural sciences, the social and behavioural sciences, mechanics and engineering, all of which, in one way or another, will subsume physiology, biochemistry, medicine, physiotherapy, kinesiology, biomechanics, psychology and sociology. Some of these are almost indigenous to sport and have grown up out of the things that have always concerned competitors and their coaches, and would be easily recognised by Jackie Smith; others have transported their knowledges and attitudes into sport from a distance. Despite this vast array of backgrounds and interests, most of the scientists who have applied themselves to sport would want us to believe that their presence has enhanced sport in some way. Often, regrettably, it has not.

If sport science is troublesome to define, 'sport' itself is no less so. Most of us, as we assiduously avoid defining sport, believe we recognise it when we see it. Sport is entertainment and it is also business, it is fun and it is also hard-work, it is education but it is also ceremony and ritual. It is however, none of these alone. Sport has the ability to ennoble but also to demean, it can produce pride and also embarrassment, it can produce heroes and also scape-goats. Sport is as much about the vanquished as it is about the victors.

The language of sport over the past 200 years gives us some clues as to how sport has been able to create this alchemy, how it has created something so complex and powerful out of activities that are so simple: "Fair play", "may the best man win", "gentlemanly conduct" and the "level playing-field", not only found their way into the language of sport, but also into the rules. Incidentally, they reflect an age when the rules were written for male-dominated sport, but that is hardly the point. What these words show is that the alchemy that has turned sport into something more than entertainment or business or the rest, is to be found in that most unlikely of places, somewhere in sports ethics.

Without the rules that enshrine sport's ethical base there would be no sport: there would only be contests, there would be winners and losers, but there would be no sport: there would be victors and vanquished but there would be no heroes. It might be entertaining, and it might be big business, but it would not be sport.

Herein lies one of the problems for the sport sciences, for if they are to serve the best interests of sport, then those who work in them must follow the ethical framework of sport. The evidence, however, is somewhat different, it is that scientists who apply their knowledge to sport will serve anyone who pays!

There are paradoxes at play here too. Despite my assertions about the whole point of sport being in its ethical framework, I am well aware that it would be hard to find now, and perhaps at any time in history, any group of people more amoral than competing athletes. Even in the Corinthian Age it is likely that the vast majority of competitors were single-minded in their quest for victory, to say the least.

If sport brought us fair play it also brought us the foul and now the professional foul. We hear athletes talking about "the referee's blind-side", and "playing to the whistle". Thus, it was also deemed necessary when framing rules to make reference to "ungentlemanly conduct" and to "bringing the sport into disrepute". It is certainly not the case that competing athletes are embued with a greater sense of fair play than anyone else, nor that they have a surer grasp of moral rightness than their non-sporting colleagues, it is simply that they are governed by the various rules of sport. This is not a control that usually extends to sport scientists however.

It is now one of the clichés of sport that the important thing is not the winning but the taking part. We all know what it means, and when we are old enough we probably recognise its truth. For competing athletes however, it is absurd: they are the words of the old who have lost touch with the real world even if they ever had it. The whole point of sport, at the level of the performer is winning, or at least trying to win. In 1801, when Robert Barclay-Allardice sought the best scientific brains in the country, he was looking, at least on the surface, for a man who would help him win: nothing more nor less. In reality, his motives may have been more complex. In addition to the winning and the money that went with it, important as that was, he was driven by his pride, consideration for his reputation and his quest for glory.

How many athletes were to follow him in the years ahead? And how many clubs, companies, associations and eventually countries were to follow this path. This brings us back to the topic of performance enhancement. As the years went by, it was not only the athlete who turned to scientists to improve performance, later it was sometimes coaches, managers and even politicians.

Performance enhancement can sound a laudable aim if you think of it only in terms of helping athletes achieve their full potential, but it can also be used to demonstrate the 'superiority' of your athletes, your club or your country, or, even worse, the 'inferiority' of rival athletes, clubs or countries. In all these causes, sport scientists have, in the past, been eager to help. One of the most disreputable chapters in the history of sport science was the development, administration and monitoring of drugs to enhance the performance of athletes in the DDR and elsewhere in the 1960's and beyond. Sporting success was a tool of domestic and foreign policy in the DDR and elsewhere, but in the process a whole generation of athletes were tainted, and their rivals bruised by the experience. Sport was a loser in almost every sense and sport science, and those who worked in it, must share their part of the responsibility for it.

Nor is this a unique example of scientists failing sport while claiming to serve it. Let us consider the latter part of the 19th and the early part of this century when young women were encouraged to believe that if they were to be involved in strenuous sport there would be complications when their time came to have children, and men were encouraged to believe that young women would lose their femininity. Those who supported, and in some cases even led, these views were the very medical doctors and scientists that the rest of the community looked to to provide objective, scientific guidance. What they got, under the cloak of science and objective truth, was personal opinion, bias and a mirror held up to the fears that the ordinary, but uninformed people in the street, held.

With more space, the catalogue of woes that science has brought to sport over the past 200 years could be much longer, and every reader will probably be able to extend the list, but this, too, would be bias, for there have also been benefits, and many of them. But what these episodes tell us at the very least is that sport scientists should approach sport with a goodly measure of humility. No-one should ever unquestioningly accept the contributions from the 'hard' scientists in sport and those who pay them. I say this, not out of any animosity to a large number of my colleagues, but because I am aware that too much reverence for their brand of 'knowledge' can be dangerous. This is one of the issues for the sport sciences to tackle in the future. Sport and the sport sciences are as multi- disciplinary as anything can be. At the heart of every sporting activity is a person acted upon by as many psychological, social and historical factors as you can imagine: they are not merely physiological or mechanical systems. Nor are they merely machines being prepared for victory, even if the athletes sometimes behave as if they are.

Since Jackie Smith's day many things have changed but on some fronts we still seem to be in the grip of a form of Empiricism Worship. There is still a tendency by some in the scientific community to value most those disciplines in which precise measurements are possible, and it is still the case that these disciplines, even today, find it easier than others to raise money for their research. Within the sport sciences , where we clearly should know better, there are still those who believe that their brand of 'knowledge' is more important than others'.

If the sport sciences are to avoid some of the pit-falls of the past, they must recognise the contribution from those in other disciplines, those who labour with ideas and observations that are less precisely measurable, such as the philosophers, historians and sociologists, but whose contribution is probably vital if the body of sport is to remain alive and well. For it is the use of history that provides a perspective, the use of sociology that provides a context , and together with philosophy, it is here that we should look for our values.

In a similar vein, I was reminded recently of the mutual inter-dependence of the arts and the sciences:

There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way, and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art, science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science, art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quakery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.¹

Raymond Chandler, above, was not writing about the study of sport prior to the last World War, but his observations are no less valuable for that.

In the 21st century sport will, of course, continue at all levels, and will be many things to many people. At some levels it will be entertainment and business, as well as sport, and, with the availability of digital communications, those who perform in it will sometimes carry the aspirations of millions. In the 21st century sport has the potential to be used to emphasise the importance of the individual, and the need for people to have ideals and dreams and to strive to achieve them. We all know, however, that sport and the forces of business, politics and the media acting on it can, on the other hand, act to brutalise or trivialise the individual. Sadly, the sport sciences can help sport, politics and business do its dirtiest business as well as its most noble. Is it too much to hope that the scientists who work in sport in the 21st century will work to understand the ethics of sport and the values that its sister disciplines can help reveal, and so find ways of preserving those values that make sport interesting in the first place?

I hope that sosol will play its part. I am not going to wish on it the stultifying role of acting as sport's moral watch-dog, but I do hope that in the future it will provide a forum for those who wish to examine sport and how it is changing, and the role that it plays, or perhaps could or should play, in society. Above all, I hope sosol will act as a focus for sport to be discussed, analysed and evaluated not merely as entertainment or ritual or as a business, educational or social process, but as a series of activities in which people, either individually or in groups, experience something which is worthwhile in their lives - whether they win or lose.

Oh .... by the way, Robert Barclay-Allardice won his event, and in his final time-trial before the big day achieved the greatest performance of its kind up to that date (119miles/191km in 19 hours), and then went on to compete for £10,500 "the largest sum ever of any time match ever attempted in this kingdom", (close to half a million pounds Sterling now!) and won comfortably, being chaired off the ground, with his ears ringing to the cheers of thousands. No wonder Jackie Smith had a reputation for being ...very knowing in all sporting science. Anyone interested in a seminar on his methods?

¹I am indebted to Prof. Craig Sharp, who among other things is a friend, an eminent specialist in exercise physiology and Scottish poetry, for bringing this extract to my attention.

January 1998.

References

Barclay-Allarice, R. (1842). Agricultural tour in the United States and Upper Canada with miscellaneous notices Edinburgh, Blackwood and Sons.

Chandler, R. (1938). The notebooks of Raymond Chandler New York: Ecco Press

Radford, P.F. (1989). From oral tradition to printed record: British sports science in transition, 1805-1807. In, Proceedings of XIIth HISPA Congress, Eds. M.Lammer, R.Renson and J. Riordan, Sankt Augustin, Academia-Verlag Richarz

Sinclair, Sir John. (1806). A collection of papers on the subject of athletic exercises, etc. London: Privately printed and distributed

Thom, W. (1813). Pedestrianism; or an account of the performances of celebrated pedestrians of the last and present century Aberdeen: D. Chalmers and Company.

The Edinburgh Advertiser, 24 November 1801.

The Times, 14 November 1801.

Copyright sociology of sport online, 1998