Bay Area Sports News
For them, gymnastic festivals were grand occasions at which tens of thousands of disciplined men and women demonstrated nationalistic fervour. Behind this epochal transition from Renaissance to modern sports lay the scientific developments that sustained the Industrial Revolution. Athletes trained systematically to achieve their physical maximum. New games, such as basketball, volleyball, and team handball, were consciously invented to specifications as if they were new products for the market. As early as the late 17th century, quantification became an important aspect of sports, and the cultural basis was created for the concept of the sports record. The word record, in the sense of an unsurpassed quantified achievement, appeared, first in English and then in other languages, late in the 19th century, but the concept went back nearly 200 years.
- Football is the world’s most popular ball game, but, wherever American economic and culture influence has been dominant, the attraction to
