Introduction: Sport and Politics

Abstract

In his contribution to this collection of articles Guttmann remarks: 'The intersection of sports and politics has been a major focus of contemporary sports history.' He goes on to provide a perceptive overview of some of the 'broad areas' in which engaged historians (as he describes them) have worked. It is important to be reminded of this activity, and of its extent, which is considerable. However, what Guttmann's discussion also reveals is an unevenness in the coverage. Three characteristics in particular stand out from the field he surveys. First, a great deal of the activity he comments on has been non-British; second, much of its emphasis has been on the politics of sport rather than the contribution of sport to wider political processes; and third, the intersection has mostly been approached from the direction of sports history, rather than from that of 'mainstream' political history. In Britain, where academic sports history has a rather shorter lineage than that of North America, whence many of Guttmann's examples are drawn, the focus on politics is less marked. Whilst it would be unfair to say that sports historians have followed the convention of the sports journalists whose copy has so often provided their sources, and kept sport apart from normal life, there is nonetheless a case for saying that much of what has been written in Britain is 'history with the politics left out'. There are, to be sure, some notable exceptions to this tendency. The names of Grant Jarvie, Lincoln Allison, Barrie Houlihan and James Riordan immediately stand out as pioneers of a politically-attuned study of sport (though, arguably, only one of them might claim to be a historian).' Moreover, many theoretical approaches to sport and leisure, whether Marxist or Weberian, have been avowedly political. John Hargreaves's Sport, Power and Culture is a fine example, informed by a reading of Gramsci.2 Equally, though, there is an inclination in some of the newer forms of social and cultural history to eschew the political, at least in the sense of politics with a capital 'P'. The flight into the cultural, which is warmly to be encouraged for many reasons, has nonetheless often transformed 'politics' into something more broadly to do with 'power relations', with the result that the political process in its institutional governmental and party guises, and at its various