Contesting Identities Sports American Film
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Although the precise roots of the connection amongst sports and international relations stay obscure, all cultures have participated over the course of history in dissimilar physical contests that fostered cultural interchange and contributed to their citizens’ political discourse. The ancient Egyptians swam, raced, wrestled, and played games with balls. The ancient Greeks kept huge athletic festivals, including the Olympic Games that drew athletes’ attention from all over the ancient world. Two of the very firstborn ‘nations’ to engage their athletes in sport competitions, were the Greeks and the Romans. They competed in respective athletic events like chariot races, or throwing the javelin, often times relying on the participation of animals, or on the use of mechanical contrivances, a tradition continued into innovative times in sports such as dog racing, horse racing, and shooting. During the Middle Ages, the cultural isolation enforced by the feudal scheme and religious system of belief that opposed the use of the body for play hampered the development of organised sport in the Western world. For a good deal of centuries, contests amongst knights in tournaments that emphasised military skill were amongst the only forms of approved, public sports. In the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, games and exercise attained renewed popularity. As had been the case in ancient times, however, politics and social class circumscribed activity. Sports that required wealth or leisure, such as polo or falconry, were the province of the upper classes, affluent nations, while inexpensive, massed sports, such as soccer, took root amongst commoners and underdeveloped countries. The late 19th century witnessed an expanding faith in sport as utile recreation and as a mean of interconnectivity amid persons and nations, while in industrialized societies instrumentation was standardized, local and national organizations were set up to govern play, and a doctrine of character-building declared sports to be a necessary endeavor for men. The revival of the Olympics in 1896 and the blossoming U.S. intercollegiate athletic system boosted a good deal of forms of amateur, or unpaid sports at the same time that professional sports (such as baseball, boxing, and bicycle racing) drew big numbers of spectators. Sports that were traditionally played only in specific countries became by legislative act or popular acceptance, national sports, like baseball in the United States, bullfighting in Spain and Mexico, cricket in England, and ice hockey in Canada. During the 20th century, sports took on an more and more global flavor detached from the world championships for person sports, like soccer’s World Cup, large-scale global meets, such as the Pan-American Games and the Commonwealth Games, were inaugurated. Sports have correspondingly become progressively politicized, as the boycott of the 1980 Moscow games by Western nations has shown, or the retaliatory boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles games by Soviet-bloc nations, an interchange brought on by Soviet actions in Afghanistan. Despite the difficultnesses that rose over the past, sport events are considered today a great prospect for person countries to advertize their cultures, politics and trade. The new terms of globalization and global relations came into the scene of economic evolution and affected sport’s politics, regulations, communication and society as a whole, by using sports mass acceptance as a dominant tool for international negotiations and cultural exchange. |
An in-depth study of the films that had as their primary focus or theme sports and athletic competition