Abstract des Autors

The ancient Panhellenic festivals had honored the human body. Athletes were required to swear that they had "regularly exercised for ten months" and to exhibit their strength and skill before the judges for thirty days preceding the contests. Before entering the stadium, contestants declared that they had prepared themselves "in a manner suitable to the dignity of the Olympic Games." Celebrated in ode and legend, by steles and statues, victorious athletes might be accorded the status of "heroes" - superior to other men; inferior to the gods. In nineteenth-century Britain, the icon of the athlete again assumed "heroic" proportions. The ideal Victorian athlete "embodied" strength, fortitude, tenacity, courage, and something tantamount to moral rectitude. In portrait, poem, novel, and sermon, classical athleticism, medieval chivalry, and middle-class concepts of "manliness" were celebrated and endlessly proclaimed. The athlete, it was repeatedly said, possessed qualities that were needed to extend and protect an Empire. The athlete represented the future of the "race." Fascination with the classical world and with agonistic athletics increased during the Victorian period, especially within the orbit of Oxford, Cambridge, and the elite public schools. The ideals around which Arnold's Rugby revolved, were "Greek and cricket." Realities, however, were closer to James Mangan's assessment: "Manliness ... embraced antithetical values" - "success and ruthlessness tempered by a certain amount of courtesy and an ethos which held that victory must be attained within the rules." These were the values of a rising class of "gentleman amateurs" who increasingly came to use the athletic contest as a major arena in which to act out, quite literally, statements about their own perceived status and values. In democratic and "egalitarian" America, athletes were frequently compared with frontiersmen or portrayed as possessing the same qualities as military heroes or "captains of industry." Everyone who recognizes "the importance of robust, physical manhood in a modern commonwealth," John Bingham wrote in 1897, must acknowledge the absolute value of athletics. The realities of preparing for the contest - that is training - were much more mundane. Grafted onto what were largely classical conceptions of the body, nineteenth-century training regimens initially drew much of their rationales and practices from Galen and other ancient authorities. Around mid-century, as competitive contests began to assume new proportions - and an "amateur" ethos burgeoned - new ideas began to erode the earlier "professional" orientation. The French historian Hippolyte Taine declared of England in the 1870s: "There are ... gentlemen in this country whose ambition and regimen are those of the Greek athlete: they adopt a special diet ... and follow a careful system of training. As soon as they are ready they set out to obtain the prize for rowing or cricket at all the principal athletic games meetings in England. To accommodate the needs of such men, a new type of training manual began to appear - first in England, then in the United States and on the Continent. Verf.-Referat