BRITISH PRESTIGE

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 379, 10 March 1937, Page 2

BRITISH PRESTIGE

Make Our Games Truly Professional. London, February 13. If British prestige suffers because of our comparative failure in the Olympic Games, let us ■b? .perfectly honest and make the games out-and-out professional. Let us send people who are virtually .the best-trained robots the country can produce.” This was the advice given by Mr Harold Abrahams, the Olympic runner, sipeaking at a dinner of the Authors Club in London this week. After describing excessive nationalism in sport as a thoroughly undesirable policy, Mr Abrahams added: “What puzzles mo, and, to a certain extent, worries me, is where this race in athletic armaments is going to end. “Haven above knows, that in these days of petty national squabbles we are entitled to look round for some instrument which will enable us to find similarities, and not differences among nations. “You are a fool if you do hot use a universal instrument like sport for the purposes ol bent er international understanding. The great danger lies in this excessive national effort."