I've got some fragmentary thoughts about sport, today's prompt. Hopefully by the time I've finished this post they will have coalesced into something meaningful!
We don't have a lot on sport generally, and I'm even more starved now that I've only got the books I brought home with me, but we do have this:
Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe, c. 1909-39 / Bernard Vere - find the hard copy in our collection (the UL only has E-Legal Deposit which means it's currently unavailable). It was bought because we are thinking about an Olympics exhibition (I think Paris 1924 was mentioned).
I'm sure most people are aware that the Olympics when it first began didn't just include sport, but also the arts. Quite sad that this element hasn't been continued! There have also been a lot of changes throughout, as you might have guessed. As an archer, I got quite nerdy about archery in the Olympics - it was present in most of the very early Games (1900, '04, '08 and 1920) but was dropped, possibly with good reason. Firstly, archery has a lot of different disciplines, and various different disciplines were popular with each different country that hosted - that included target archery, field archery, and even popinjay (which is still quite popular in Belgium, which hosted that year)!
That basically meant that the home nation would triumph in the medals. Secondly, not enough nations would field teams at all, so it was quietly dropped after 1920, not being picked up again until 1972 in Munich, when the competition had become a lot more standardised under FITA (Fédération Internationale de Tir à l'Arc, now World Archery Federation).
I was lucky enough to go see the archery at London 2012, held at Lords Cricket Ground. Here's a mention of the 2011 test event we got tickets for. And having completely deviated from the library and fully into sport, I'm now going to pull it all the way back again with a new resource I've been enjoying from Gale (we have a free trial for a few months): Gale Primary Sources.
One thing I've done idly, in spare moments, off and on, is try and dig up a bit more about Cambridge University Bowmen, the university's archery club. It certainly existed in some form in Victorian times, then it seems to have disappeared (much like archery from the Olympics!) until it restarted, possibly in the 40s, with the first we hear of it again being the Varsity Match held in 1950. So I did a poke around on Gale for any more information, and found out lots of information - that 1950 was the first of the modern matches (and has been held every year since - until now!), but in the 1910s and 1920s Cambridge city actually held the Grand National Archery Meeting (GNAM) a couple of times! I need more time to do more digging, but it's really exciting to see that the Varsity Match was so important that an article on it actually appears in the Times!
We don't have a lot on sport generally, and I'm even more starved now that I've only got the books I brought home with me, but we do have this:
Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe, c. 1909-39 / Bernard Vere - find the hard copy in our collection (the UL only has E-Legal Deposit which means it's currently unavailable). It was bought because we are thinking about an Olympics exhibition (I think Paris 1924 was mentioned).
I'm sure most people are aware that the Olympics when it first began didn't just include sport, but also the arts. Quite sad that this element hasn't been continued! There have also been a lot of changes throughout, as you might have guessed. As an archer, I got quite nerdy about archery in the Olympics - it was present in most of the very early Games (1900, '04, '08 and 1920) but was dropped, possibly with good reason. Firstly, archery has a lot of different disciplines, and various different disciplines were popular with each different country that hosted - that included target archery, field archery, and even popinjay (which is still quite popular in Belgium, which hosted that year)!
 |
| Popinjay Archery: image from The Jorvik Group |
That basically meant that the home nation would triumph in the medals. Secondly, not enough nations would field teams at all, so it was quietly dropped after 1920, not being picked up again until 1972 in Munich, when the competition had become a lot more standardised under FITA (Fédération Internationale de Tir à l'Arc, now World Archery Federation).
I was lucky enough to go see the archery at London 2012, held at Lords Cricket Ground. Here's a mention of the 2011 test event we got tickets for. And having completely deviated from the library and fully into sport, I'm now going to pull it all the way back again with a new resource I've been enjoying from Gale (we have a free trial for a few months): Gale Primary Sources.
One thing I've done idly, in spare moments, off and on, is try and dig up a bit more about Cambridge University Bowmen, the university's archery club. It certainly existed in some form in Victorian times, then it seems to have disappeared (much like archery from the Olympics!) until it restarted, possibly in the 40s, with the first we hear of it again being the Varsity Match held in 1950. So I did a poke around on Gale for any more information, and found out lots of information - that 1950 was the first of the modern matches (and has been held every year since - until now!), but in the 1910s and 1920s Cambridge city actually held the Grand National Archery Meeting (GNAM) a couple of times! I need more time to do more digging, but it's really exciting to see that the Varsity Match was so important that an article on it actually appears in the Times!
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| Varsity Match 2003 - the winning team! |
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