Sports, physical contests pursued for the goals and challenges they entail. Sports are part of every culture past and present, but each culture has its own definition of sports. The most useful definitions are those that clarify the relationship of sports to play, games, and contests. “Play,” wrote the German theorist Carl Diem, “is purposeless activity, for its own sake, the opposite of work.” Humans work because they have to; they play because they want to. Play is autotelic—that is, it has its own goals. It is voluntary and uncoerced. Recalcitrant children compelled by their parents or teachers to compete in a game of football (soccer) are not really engaged in a sport. Neither are professional athletes if their only motivation is their paycheck. In the real world, as a practical matter, motives are frequently mixed and often quite impossible to determine. Unambiguous definition is nonetheless a prerequisite to practical determinations about what is and is not an example of play.

There are at least two types of play. The first is spontaneous and unconstrained. Examples abound. A child sees a flat stone, picks it up, and sends it skipping across the waters of a pond. An adult realizes with a laugh that he has uttered an unintended pun. Neither action is premeditated, and both are at least relatively free of constraint. The second type of play is regulated. There are rules to determine which actions are legitimate and which are not. These rules transform spontaneous play into games, which can thus be defined as rule-bound or regulated play. Leapfrog, chess, “playing house,” and basketball are all games, some with rather simple rules, others governed by a somewhat more complex set of regulations. In fact, the rule books for games such as basketball are hundreds of pages long.

As games, chess and basketball are obviously different from leapfrog and playing house. The first two games are competitive, the second two are not. One can win a game of basketball, but it makes no sense to ask who has won a game of leapfrog. In other words, chess and basketball are contests.

A final distinction separates contests into two types: those that require at least a minimum of physical skill and those that do not. Shuffleboard is a good example of the first; the board games Scrabble and Monopoly will do to exemplify the second. It must of course be understood that even the simplest sports, such as weightlifting, require a modicum of intellectual effort, while others, such as baseball, involve a considerable amount of mental alertness. It must also be understood that the sports that have most excited the passions of humankind, as participants and as spectators, have required a great deal more physical prowess than a game of shuffleboard. Through the ages, sports heroes have demonstrated awesome strength, speed, stamina, endurance, and dexterity.

Sports, then, can be defined as autotelic (played for their own sake) physical contests. On the basis of this definition, one can devise a simple inverted-tree diagram. Despite the clarity of the definition, difficult questions arise. Is mountain climbing a sport? It is if one understands the activity as a contest between the climber and the mountain or as a competition between climbers to be the first to accomplish an ascent. Are the drivers at the Indianapolis 500 automobile race really athletes? They are if one believes that at least a modicum of physical skill is required for winning the competition. The point of a clear definition is that it enables one to give more or less satisfactory answers to questions such as these. One can hardly understand sport if one does not begin with some conception of what sports are.


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No one can say when sports began. Since it is impossible to imagine a time when children did not spontaneously run races or wrestle, it is clear that children have always included sports in their play, but one can only speculate about the emergence of sports as autotelic physical contests for adults. Hunters are depicted in prehistoric art, but it cannot be known whether the hunters pursued their prey in a mood of grim necessity or with the joyful abandon of sportsmen. It is certain, however, from the rich literary and iconographic evidence of all ancient civilizations that hunting soon became an end in itself—at least for royalty and nobility. Archaeological evidence also indicates that ball games were common among ancient peoples as different as the Chinese and the Aztecs. If ball games were contests rather than noncompetitive ritual performances, such as the Japanese football game kemari, then they were sports in the most rigorously defined sense. That it cannot simply be assumed that they were contests is clear from the evidence presented by Greek and Roman antiquity, which indicates that ball games had been for the most part playful pastimes like those recommended for health by the Greek physician Galen in the 2nd century ce.

Traditional African sports

It is unlikely that the 7th-century Islamic conquest of North Africa radically altered the traditional sports of the region. As long as wars were fought with bow and arrow, archery contests continued to serve as demonstrations of ready prowess. The prophet Muhammad specifically authorized horse races, and geography dictated that men race camels as well as horses. Hunters, too, took their pleasures on horseback.

Among the many games of North Africa was ta kurt om el mahag (“the ball of the pilgrim’s mother”), a Berber bat-and-ball contest whose configuration bore an uncanny resemblance to baseball. Koura, more widely played, was similar to football (soccer).

Cultural variation among black Africans was far greater than among the Arab peoples of the northern littoral. Ball games were rare, but wrestling of one kind or another was ubiquitous. Wrestling’s forms and functions varied from tribe to tribe. For the Nuba of southern Sudan, ritual bouts, for which men’s bodies were elaborately decorated as well as carefully trained, were the primary source of male status and prestige. The Tutsi and Hutu of Rwanda were among the peoples who staged contests between females. Among the various peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, wrestling matches were a way to celebrate or symbolically encourage human fertility and the earth’s fecundity. In southern Nigeria, for instance, Igbo tribesmen participated in wrestling matches held every eighth day throughout the three months of the rainy season; hard-fought contests, it was thought, persuaded the gods to grant abundant harvests of corn (maize) and yams. Among the Diola of the Gambia, adolescent boys and girls wrestled (though not against one another) in what was clearly a prenuptial ceremony. Male champions were married to their female counterparts. In other tribes, such as the Yala of Nigeria, the Fon of Benin, and the Njabi of the Congo, boys and girls grappled with each other. Among the Kole, it was the kin of the bride and the bridegroom who wrestled. Stick fights, which seem to have been less closely associated with religious practices, were common among many tribes, including the Zulu and Mpondo of southern Africa.

Contests for runners and jumpers were to be found across the length and breadth of the continent. During the age of imperialism, explorers and colonizers were often astonished by the prowess of these “primitive” peoples. Nandi runners of Kenya’s Rift Valley seemed to run distances effortlessly at a pace that brought European runners to pitiable physical collapse. Tutsi high jumpers of Rwanda and Burundi soared to heights that might have seemed incredible had not the jumpers been photographed in flight by members of Adolf Friedrich zu Mecklenburg’s anthropological expedition at the turn of the 20th century.

Long before European conquest introduced modern sports and marginalized native customs, conversion to Islam tended to undercut—if not totally eliminate—the religious function of African sports, but elements of pre-Christian and pre-Islamic magical cults have survived into postcolonial times. Zulu football players rely not only on their coaches and trainers but also on the services of their inyanga (“witch doctor”).

Traditional Asian sports

Like the highly evolved civilizations of which they are a part, traditional Asian sports are ancient and various. Competitions were never as simple as they seemed to be. From the Islamic Middle East across the Indian subcontinent to China and Japan, wrestlers—mostly but not exclusively male—embodied and enacted the values of their cultures. The wrestler’s strength was always more than a merely personal statement. More often than not, the men who strained and struggled understood themselves to be involved in a religious endeavour. Prayers, incantations, and rituals of purification were for centuries an important aspect of the hand-to-hand combat of Islamic wrestlers. It was not unusual to combine the skills of the wrestler with those of a mystic poet. Indeed, the celebrated 14th-century Persian pahlavan (ritual wrestler) Maḥmūd Khwārezmī was both.

Typical of the place of sport within a religious context was the spectacle of 50 sturdy Turks who wrestled in Istanbul in 1582 to celebrate the circumcision of the son of Murad III. When Indian wrestlers join an akhara (gymnasium), they commit themselves to the quest for a holy life. As devout Hindus, they recite mantras as they do their knee bends and push-ups. In their struggle against “pollution,” they strictly control their diet, sexual habits, breathing, and even their urination and defecation.

While the religious aspects of Turkish and Iranian “houses of strength” (where weightlifting and gymnastics were practiced) became much less salient in the course of the 20th century, the elders in charge of Japanese sumo added a number of Shintō elements to the rituals of their sport to underscore their claim that it is a unique expression of Japanese tradition. A somewhat arbitrary distinction can be made between wrestling and the many forms of unarmed hand-to-hand combat categorized as martial arts. The emphasis of the latter is military rather than religious, instrumental rather than expressive. Chinese wushu (“military skill”), which included armed as well as unarmed combat, was highly developed by the 3rd century bce. Its unarmed techniques were especially prized within Chinese culture and were an important influence on the martial arts of Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Much less well known in the West are varma adi (“hitting the vital spots”) and other martial arts traditions of South Asia. In the early modern era, as unarmed combat became obsolete, the emphasis of Asian martial arts tended to shift back toward religion. This shift can often be seen in the language of sports. Japanese kenjutsu (“techniques of the sword”) became kendō (“the way of the sword”).

  • Sumo wrestling in Japan; referee in traditional robe at left
    Sumo wrestling in Japan; referee in traditional robe at left
    Burt Glinn/Magnum

Of the armed (as opposed to unarmed) martial arts, archery was among the most important in the lives of Asian warriors from the Arabian to the Korean peninsulas. Notably, the Japanese samurai practiced many forms of archery, the most colourful of which was probably yabusame, whose mounted contestants drew their bows and loosed their arrows while galloping down a straight track some 720 to 885 feet (220 to 270 metres) long. They were required to shoot in quick succession at three small targets—each about 9 square inches (55 square cm) placed on 3-foot- (0.9-metre-) high poles 23 to 36 feet (7 to 11 metres) from the track and spaced at intervals of 235 to 295 feet (71.5 to 90 metres). In yabusame, accuracy was paramount.

In Turkey, where the composite (wood plus horn) bow was an instrument of great power, archers competed for distance. At Istanbul’s Okmeydanı (“Arrow Field”), the record was set in 1798 when Selim III’s arrow flew more than 2,900 feet (884 metres).

As can be seen in Mughal art of the 16th and 17th centuries, aristocratic Indians—like their counterparts throughout Asia—used their bows and arrows for hunting as well as for archery contests. Mounted hunters demonstrated equestrian as well as toxophilite skills. The Asian aristocrat’s passion for horses, which can be traced as far back as Hittite times, if not earlier, led not only to horse races (universal throughout Asia) but also to the development of polo and a host of similar equestrian contests. These equestrian games may in fact be the most distinctive Asian contribution to the repertory of modern sports.

In all probability, polo evolved from a far rougher game played by the nomads of Afghanistan and Central Asia. In the form that survived into the 21st century, Afghan buzkashi is characterized by a dusty melee in which hundreds of mounted tribesmen fought over the headless carcass of a goat. The winner was the hardy rider who managed to grab the animal by the leg and drag it clear of the pack. Since buzkashi was clearly an inappropriate passion for a civilized monarch, polo filled the bill. Persian manuscripts from the 6th century refer to polo played during the reign of Hormuz I (271–273). The game was painted by miniaturists and celebrated by Persian poets such as Ferdowsī (c. 935–c. 1020) and Ḥāfeẓ (1325/26–1389/90). By 627 polo had spread throughout the Indian subcontinent and had reached China, where it became a passion among those wealthy enough to own horses. (All 16 emperors of the Tang dynasty [618–907] were polo players.) As with most sports, the vast majority of polo players were male, but the 12th-century Persian poet Neẓāmī commemorated the skills of Princess Shīrīn. Moreover, if numerous terra-cotta figures can be trusted as evidence, polo was also played by aristocratic Chinese women.

There were also ball games for ordinary men and women. Played with carefully sewn stuffed skins, with animal bladders, or with found objects as simple as gourds, chunks of wood, or rounded stones, ball games are universal. Ball games of all sorts were quite popular among the Chinese. Descriptions of the game cuju, which resembled modern football (soccer), appeared as early as the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220). Games similar to modern badminton were also played in the 1st century. Finally, the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) scroll painting Grove of Violets depicts elegantly attired ladies playing chuiwan, a game similar to modern golf.

Sports of the ancient Mediterranean world


Sports were unquestionably common in ancient Egypt, where pharaohs used their hunting prowess and exhibitions of strength and skill in archery to demonstrate their fitness to rule. In such exhibitions, pharaohs such as Amenhotep II (ruled 1426–1400 bce) never competed against anyone else, however, and there is reason to suspect that their extraordinary achievements were scribal fictions. Nonetheless, Egyptians with less claim to divinity wrestled, jumped, and engaged in ball games and stick fights. In paintings found at Beni Hassan, in a tomb dating from the Middle Kingdom (1938–c. 1630 bce), there are studies of 406 pairs of wrestlers demonstrating their skill.

Crete and Greece

Since Minoan script still baffles scholars, it is uncertain whether images of Cretan boys and girls testing their acrobatic skills against bulls depict sport, religious ritual, or both. That the feats of the Cretans may have been both sport and ritual is suggested by evidence from Greece, where sports had a cultural significance unequaled anywhere else before the rise of modern sports. Secular and religious motives mingle in history’s first extensive “sports report,” found in Book XXIII of Homer’s Iliad in the form of funeral games for the dead Patroclus. These games were part of Greek religion and were not, therefore, autotelic; the contests in the Odyssey, on the other hand, were essentially secular. Odysseus was challenged by the Phaeacians to demonstrate his prowess as an athlete. In general, Greek culture included both cultic sports, such as the Olympic Games honouring Zeus, and secular contests.

The most famous association of sports and religion was certainly the Olympic Games, which Greek tradition dates from 776 bce. In the course of time, the earth goddess Gaea, originally worshiped at Olympia, was supplanted in importance by the sky god Zeus, in whose honour priestly officials conducted quadrennial athletic contests. Sacred games also were held at Delphi (in honour of Apollo), Corinth, and Nemea. These four events were known as the periodos, and great athletes, such as Theagenes of Thasos, prided themselves on victories at all four sites. Although most of the events contested at Greek sacred games remain familiar, the most important competition was the chariot race. The extraordinary prestige accorded athletic triumphs brought with it not only literary accolades (as in the odes of Pindar) and visual commemoration (in the form of statues of the victors) but also material benefits, contrary to the amateur myth propagated by 19th-century philhellenists. Since the Greeks were devoted to secular sports as well as to sacred games, no polis, or city-state, was considered a proper community if it lacked a gymnasium where, as the word gymnos indicates, naked male athletes trained and competed. Except in militaristic Sparta, Greek women rarely participated in sports of any kind. They were excluded from the Olympic Games even as spectators (except for the priestess of Demeter). The 2nd-century-ce traveler Pausanias wrote of races for girls at Olympia, but these events in honour of Hera were of minor importance.


Although chariot races were among the most popular sports spectacles of the Roman and Byzantine eras, as they had been in Greek times, the Romans of the republic and the early empire were quite selectively enthusiastic about Greek athletic contests. Emphasizing physical exercises for military preparedness, an important motive in all ancient civilizations, the Romans preferred boxing, wrestling, and hurling the javelin to running footraces and throwing the discus. The historian Livy wrote of Greek athletes’ appearing in Rome as early as 186 bce; however, the contestants’ nudity shocked Roman moralists. The emperor Augustus instituted the Actian Games in 27 bce to celebrate his victory over Antony and Cleopatra, and several of his successors began similar games, but it was not until the later empire, especially during the reign of Hadrian (117–138 ce), that many of the Roman elite developed an enthusiasm for Greek athletics.

Greater numbers flocked to the chariot races held in Rome’s Circus Maximus. They were watched by as many as 250,000 spectators, five times the number that crowded into the Colosseum to enjoy gladiatorial combat. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that the latter contests were actually more popular than the former. Indeed, the munera, which pitted man against man, and the venationes, which set men against animals, became popular even in the Greek-speaking Eastern Empire, which historians once thought immune from the lust for blood. The greater frequency of chariot races can be explained in part by the fact that they were relatively inexpensive compared with the enormous costs of gladiatorial combat. The editor who staged the games usually rented the gladiators from a lanista (the manager of a troupe of gladiators) and was required to reimburse him for losers executed in response to a “thumbs down” sign. Brutal as these combats were, many of the gladiators were free men who volunteered to fight, an obvious sign of intrinsic motivation. Indeed, imperial edicts were needed to discourage the aristocracy’s participation. During the reign of Nero (54–68), female gladiators were introduced into the arena.

The Roman circus and the Byzantine hippodrome continued to provide chariot racing long after Christian protests (and heavy economic costs) ended the gladiatorial games, probably early in the 5th century. In many ways the chariot races were quite modern. The charioteers were divided into bureaucratically organized factions (e.g., the “Blues” and the “Greens”), which excited the loyalties of fans from Britain to Mesopotamia. Charioteers boasted of the number of their victories as modern athletes brag about their “stats,” indicating, perhaps, some incipient awareness of what in modern times are called sports records. The gladiatorial games, however, like the Greek games before them, had a powerful religious dimension. The first Roman combats, in 264 bce, were probably derived from Etruscan funeral games in which mortal combat provided companions for the deceased. It was the idolatry of the games, even more than their brutality, that horrified Christian protesters. The less-obtrusive pagan religious associations of the chariot races helped them survive for centuries after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 337 ce.

Sports in the Middle Ages

The sports of medieval Europe were less well-organized than those of classical antiquity. Fairs and seasonal festivals were occasions for men to lift stones or sacks of grain and for women to run smock races (for a smock, not in one). The favourite sport of the peasantry was folk football, a wild no-holds-barred unbounded game that pitted married men against bachelors or one village against another. The violence of the game, which survived in Britain and in France until the late 19th century, prompted Renaissance humanists, such as Sir Thomas Elyot, to condemn it as more likely to maim than to benefit the participants.

The nascent bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance amused itself with archery matches, some of which were arranged months in advance and staged with considerable fanfare. When town met town in a challenge of skill, the companies of crossbowmen and longbowmen marched behind the symbols of St. George, St. Sebastian, and other patrons of the sport. It was not unusual for contests in running, jumping, cudgeling, and wrestling to be offered for the lower classes who attended the match as spectators. Grand feasts were part of the program, and drunkenness commonly added to the revelry. In Germanic areas a Pritschenkoenig was supposed to simultaneously keep order and entertain the crowd with clever verses.

The burghers of medieval towns were welcome to watch the aristocracy at play, but they were not allowed to participate in tournaments or even, in most parts of Europe, to compete in imitative tournaments of their own. Tournaments were the jealously guarded prerogative of the medieval knight and were, along with hunting and hawking, his favourite pastime. At the tilt, in which mounted knights with lances tried to unhorse one another, the knight was practicing the art of war, his raison d’être. He displayed his prowess before lords, ladies, and commoners and profited not only from valuable prizes but also from ransoms exacted from the losers. Between the 12th and the 16th century, the dangerously wild free-for-all of the early tournament evolved into dramatic presentations of courtly life in which elaborate pageantry and allegorical display quite overshadowed the frequently inept jousting. Some danger remained even amid the display. At one of the last great tournaments, in 1559, Henry II of France was mortally wounded by a splintered lance.

  • Pairs of mounted knights jousting simultaneously; woodcut, 1565
    Pairs of mounted knights jousting simultaneously; woodcut, 1565
    Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum; photograph, J.R. Freeman & Co. Ltd.
  • Reviving the medieval sport of jousting.
    Reviving the medieval sport of jousting.
    © Behind the News (A Britannica Publishing Partner)

Peasant women participated freely in the ball games and footraces of medieval times, and aristocratic ladies hunted and kept falcons, but middle-class women contented themselves with spectatorship. Even so, they were more active than their contemporaries in Heian Japan during the 8th to 12th centuries. Encumbered by many-layered robes and sequestered in their homes, the Japanese ladies were unable to do more than peep from behind their screens at the courtiers’ mounted archery contests.

Sports in the Renaissance and modern periods

By the time of the Renaissance, sports had become entirely secular, but in the minds of the 17th-century Czech educator John Amos Comenius and other humanists, a concern for physical education on what were thought to be classic models overshadowed the competitive aspects of sports. Indeed, 15th- and 16th-century elites preferred dances to sports and delighted in geometric patterns of movement. Influenced by the ballet, which developed in France during this period, choreographers trained horses to perform graceful movements rather than to win races. French and Italian fencers such as the famed Girard Thibault, whose L’Académie de l’espée (“Fencing Academy”) appeared in 1628, thought of their activity more as an art form than as a combat. Northern Europeans emulated them. Humanistically inclined Englishmen and Germans admired the cultivated Florentine game of calcio, a form of football that stressed the good looks and elegant attire of the players. Within the world of sports, the emphasis on aesthetics, rather than achievement, was never stronger.

While the aesthetic element survives in sports such as figure skating, diving, and gymnastics, the modern emphasis is generally on quantified achievement. In fact, the transition from Renaissance to modern sports can be seen in a semantic shift; the word measure, which once connoted a sense of balance and proportion, began to refer almost exclusively to numerical measurements.

Behind this epochal transition from Renaissance to modern sports lay the scientific developments that sustained the Industrial Revolution. Technicians sought to perfect equipment. 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.

The development of modern sports having begun in late 17th-century England, it was appropriate that the concept of the sports record also first appeared there. During the Restoration and throughout the 18th century, traditional pastimes such as stick fighting and bullbaiting, which the Puritans had condemned and driven underground, gave way to organized games such as cricket, which developed under the leadership of the Marylebone Cricket Club (founded 1787). Behind these changes lay a new conception of rationalized competition. Contests that seem odd to the modern mind, such as those in which the physically impaired were matched against children, were replaced by horse races in which fleeter steeds were handicapped, a notion of equality that led eventually to age and weight classes (though not to height classes) in many modern sports. Although the traditional sport of boxing flourished throughout the 18th century, it was not until 1743 that boxer-entrepreneur Jack Broughton formulated rules to rationalize and regulate the sport. The minimal controls on mayhem imposed by Broughton were strengthened in 1867 by the marquess of Queensberry.

In the course of the 19th century, modern forms of British sports spread from the privileged classes to the common people. National organizations developed to standardize rules and regulations, to transform sporadic challenge matches into systematic league competition, to certify eligibility, and to register results.

Rowing (crew), one of the first sports to assume its modern form, began to attract a following after the first boat race between the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge (1829) and the inauguration of the Henley Regatta (1839). “Athletics” became popular after Oxford and Cambridge held their first track-and-field meet in 1864. The Amateur Athletic Association, which emphasized track-and-field sports, was founded in 1880, the Amateur Rowing Association in 1882.

Neither sport enjoyed the popularity of association football. The various versions of football played at elite schools such as Eton, Winchester, and Charterhouse were codified in the 1840s, and England’s Football Association was formed in 1863 to propagate what came to be known as “association football” (or simply “soccer”). The Rugby Football Union followed in 1871. Although the Football Association and most of its affiliated clubs were initially dominated by the middle and upper classes, soccer had definitely become “the people’s game” by the end of the century. For instance, Manchester United, one of Britain’s most storied teams, can trace its history to a club established by the city’s railroad workers in 1880.

The entry of working-class athletes into soccer and other sports, as participants if not as administrators, inspired Britain’s middle and upper classes to formulate the amateur rule, which originally excluded not only anyone paid for athletic performances but also anyone who earned his living by manual labour of any sort.


From the British Isles, modern sports (and the amateur rule) were diffused throughout the world. Sports that originally began elsewhere, such as tennis (which comes from Renaissance France), were modernized and exported as if they too were raw materials imported for British industry to transform and then export as finished goods.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the British expelled the French from Canada and from India and extended British rule over much of Africa. To the ends of the earth, cricket followed the Union Jack, which explains the game’s current popularity in Australia, South Asia, and the West Indies. Rugby football flourishes in other postcolonial cultures, such as New Zealand and South Africa, where the British once ruled. It was, however, association football’s destiny to become the world’s most widely played modern sport.

Cricket and rugby seemed to require British rule in order to take root. Football needed only the presence of British economic and cultural influence. In Buenos Aires, for instance, British residents founded clubs for cricket and a dozen other sports, but it was the Buenos Aires Football Club, founded June 20, 1867, that kindled Argentine passions. In almost every instance, the first to adopt football were the cosmopolitan sons of local elites, many of whom had been sent to British schools by their Anglophile parents. Seeking status as well as diversion, middle-class employees of British firms followed the upper-class lead. From the gamut of games played by the upper and middle classes, the industrial workers of Europe and Latin America, like the indigenous population of Africa, appropriated football as their own.

By the late 19th century, the United States had begun to rival Great Britain as an industrial power and as an inventor of modern sports. Enthusiasts of baseball denied its origins in British children’s games such as cat and rounders and concocted the myth of Abner Doubleday, who allegedly invented the game in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York. A more plausible date for the transformation of cat and rounders into baseball is 1845, when a New York bank clerk named Alexander Cartwright formulated the rules of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. Even before the Civil War, the game had been taken over by urban workers such as the volunteer firemen who organized the New York Mutuals in 1857. By the time the National League was created in 1876, the game had spread from coast to coast. (It was not until the 1950s, however, that Major League Baseball planted its first franchises on the West Coast.)

  • An early baseball game at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1859; engraving from Harper’s magazine.
    Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Basketball, invented in 1891 by James Naismith, and volleyball, invented four years later by William Morgan, are both quintessentially modern sports. Both were scientifically designed to fulfill a perceived need for indoor games during harsh New England winters.

Football (soccer) is the world’s most popular ball game, but, wherever American economic and culture influence has been dominant, the attraction to baseball, basketball, and volleyball has tended to exceed that to football. Baseball, for example, boomed in Cuba, where Nemesio Guilló introduced the game to his countrymen in 1863, and in Japan, where Horace Wilson, an American educator, taught it to his Japanese students in 1873. Since basketball and volleyball were both invented under the auspices of the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association), it seemed reasonable for YMCA workers to take the games to China, Japan, and the Philippines, where the games took root early in the 20th century. It was, however, only in the post-World War II world that U.S. influence generally overwhelmed British; only then did basketball and volleyball become globally popular.

American gridiron football, which now enjoys enclaves of enthusiasm in Great Britain and on the European continent, traces its origins to 1874, when a rugby team from Montreal’s McGill University traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to challenge a team of Harvard University students. Adopted by American students, rugby evolved into gridiron football, and in that form it became the leading intercollegiate game. Although the National Football League was established in 1920 (at $100 a franchise), the professional game was a relatively minor affair until after World War II, when football joined baseball and basketball to form the “trinity” of American sports. (Ice hockey, imported from Canada, runs a poor fourth in the race for fans of team sports.)

In the dramatic global diffusion of modern sports, the French have also played a significant role. They left it to an Englishman, Walter Wingfield, to modernize the game of tennis, which originated in Renaissance France, but the French took the lead, early in the 19th century, in the development of the bicycle and in the popularization of cycling races. The first Paris–Rouen race took place in 1869; the Tour de France was inaugurated in 1903. The huge success of the latter inspired the Giro d’Italia (1909) and a number of other long-distance races.

The French also left their mark on sports in another way. In 1894, at a conference held at the Sorbonne in Paris, Pierre de Coubertin selected the first members of a Comité International Olympique (International Olympic Committee; IOC) and arranged for the first Olympic Games of the modern era to be held in Athens in 1896. In 1904 Robert Guérin led a group of football (soccer) enthusiasts in forming the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which England’s insular Football Association was at first too arrogant to join. The English name of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (1912; since 2001 known as the International Association of Athletics Federations; IAAF) suggests that the British were more cooperative in track-and-field sports than in football, but the IAAF’s founder was a Swedish industrialist, Sigfrid Edström.

Japan, one of the few non-Western nations where traditional sports still rival modern ones in popularity, is also one of the few non-Western nations to contribute significantly to the repertory of modern sports. Judo, invented in 1882 by Kanō Jigorō in an effort to combine Western and Asian traditions, attracted European adherents early in the 20th century. In 1964 judo became an Olympic sport.

From 1952, when the Soviet Union emerged from its self-imposed sports isolation, to 1991, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ceased to exist, the communist societies of eastern Europe dominated the Olympic Games. In 1988, for instance, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), with a population of some 16 million, outscored the United States, 15 times its size. While anabolic steroids and other banned substances contributed to the East Germans’ triumph, credit must also be given to their relentless application of scientific methods in the search for the ultimate sports performance. The collapse of communism undermined state-sponsored elite sports in eastern Europe, but not before the nations of western Europe had begun to emulate their athletic adversaries by sponsoring scientific research, subsidizing elite athletes, and constructing vast training centres.

In the 20th century, sports underwent social as well as spatial diffusion. After a long and frequently bitter struggle, African Americans, Australian Aborigines, “Cape Coloureds” (in South Africa), and other excluded racial and ethnic groups won the right to participate in sports. After a long and somewhat less-bitter struggle, women also won the right to compete in sports—such as rugby—that had been considered quintessentially masculine.

While the British Isles may be considered the homeland of modern sports, modern physical education can be traced back to German and Scandinavian developments of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Men such as Johann Christoph Friedrich Guts Muths in Germany and Per Henrik Ling in Sweden elaborated systems of gymnastic exercise that were eventually adopted by school systems in Britain, the United States, and Japan. These noncompetitive alternatives to modern sports also flourished in eastern Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among repressed ethnic peoples such as the Poles and Czechs, gymnastics became almost a way of life. For them, gymnastic festivals were grand occasions at which tens of thousands of disciplined men and women demonstrated nationalistic fervour.

Gymnastic fervour was not, however, much in evidence among the world’s schoolchildren and college students as they encountered gymnastics in required physical-education classes. Calisthenic exercises designed to improve health and fitness were dull and dreary compared with the excitement of modern sports. Long before the end of the 20th century, even German educators had abandoned Leibeserziehung (“physical education”) in favour of Sportunterricht (“instruction in sports”). For young and for old, for better and for worse, sports are the world’s passion.

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