SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1912. GLADIATORS AND ATHLETES.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1545, 14 September 1912, Page 4

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1912. GLADIATORS AND ATHLETES.

A\eek by week now the European and American newspapers are bringing us thu raejancholy aftjnnath of the Olympic Games at Stockholm. America won, as all the world knows, by a margin too large to look thoroughly healthy. She won simply because her athletes were machines, scientifically picked, scientifically trained, and rendered as dead as could be to the simple sporting spirit of, let us say, the English county cricketer or the University rowing They were gladiators if ever gladiators were. The Englishmen, on 'the other hand, wero not machines. These are the simplo facts of the whole matter, and they might %vd!l have rested there, with the English public left in possession of tho right to feel consoled by the fact that at any rate English athletes were normal men and English athletics something different from the hard, brainy, soulless tiling that a great many people consider American athletics, to be. There was . n time, and it is not long passed away, when the English public would have cheerfully taken up this attitude. Times havo_ changed, however, and I the .final victory of the Americans was immediately followed by lamentations in the British press that would hardly have been inadequate had the British disaster , been tho sinking of the North Sea Fleet by the, German Navy. Mr. Beach Thomas—himself an excellent athlete and a President of tho O.U.A.C.— really began it with a solemn arraignment in the Daily Mail, of thp "scandal" of the British team's failure. The recovery of athletic supremacy was "a question for England." _ He was as grave and as patriotically concerned, almost—and so were Sin Anraun Conan Doyle and the others who joined in the discussion—as , the football authorities in this country who were recently alarmed lest the new defence system might disturb the football fixtures. This is in its way. as bad a symptom as is the American conception of athletic sport. It is ill enough for America that it sends what the Saturday ■ lieuiew- bluntly calls "a professional gang" to Stockholmmen who "have no idea of a good race or a good game," -who "run, row, and play merely to win"—but. it is far worse that responsible newspapers and responsible public men in Britain should be urging British athletes and the controllers of British sport to set to work to beat the Americans. Of course, they may beat the Americans if they try hard enough, and get far enough away from the English idea of caring more for tho game itself than for winning the game. Unhappily the "popular liress" in Britain is very ready to urge the public to drop that old and wholosomo idea, and to encourage the idea that unless , she recovers her supremacy in athletic sports Britain will not only lose caste but will lose her capacity to keep her placo in the world. To these shuddering patriots the loss of a championship appears exactly cental, in actual effect, to the loss of a Dreadnought or of a hundred thousand square miles of territory. They did, indeed, refrain from suggesting that the British roverse at Stockholm should be remedied by an enlargement of the naval programme, but they were in the frame of mind to mako that suggestion. Victory at the Olympic Games, we now can see, is possibly only through that specialisation which is going to end in the killing of genuine sport aud may end in the destruction of- some vital qualities in the nation. / We can never return to the communistic stage of sport, when they only were the spectators who were too young or too old or too infirm to play; but it is_ possible to check the growth of specialisation and the final victory of the gladiator. Perhaps the alarm of Me. Beach Thomas and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is less deeply rooted than they themselves think, and .the British public less given over to the joy of watching gladiators from the shilling stand than it sometimes appears to What the Spectator calls "our metier as sportsmen" may be forgotten temporarily, and often, but the , traditional British attitude has a long story of building behind it, and will take a vory long time in really crumbling away. The British Republican is pretty certain, if the necessity arises, to rush for a gun to defend the British Crown; and so too the British public's inclination to take the wrong view of the British defeat at Stockholm is probably a surface thing. The British defeat; at Stockholm was not a defeat in the true sense, even if the Americans , ' triumph really was a genuine triumph for America. All depends upon the spirit of the nation concerned. It delights America to have collared the pot with its specialised •gladiators; it should not displease Britain that her athletes, while no mors than extremely good ones, were rather less than cold-blooded specialists.