By men and women.. Olympians
Was/is this just not a class thing in the UK? versus liberty in the USA to compete from any background, in any sector, to endeavor and either succed or fail, win or lose.. where score is what counts, not appeasement..
Journal of Sport History, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Summer 1994)
From Pitch to Putt:
Sport and Class
in Anglo-American Sport
Steven A. Riess
Department of History
Northeastern Illinois University
Class has always been one of the paramount issues in sport historiography.
During the period 1983-1992, historians have continued to debate the role of
class in sport history, particularly its relationship to modernization, industrialization,
and urbanization. Scholars have focused on such concerns as agency and
hegemony, cultural diffusion, socialization, crowd composition and behavior,
and social mobility. This essay examines how scholars have dealt with class as
an independent and dependent variable in the United States, Great Britain. and
Canada, whose sport historiography is in each case firmly based on their national
scholarly traditions. Thus grand theory, particularly Marxism, and its
sophisticated variants, remains a major feature of British literature, moderately
so in Canada, and is largely avoided, if not rejected, in the United States. Class
remains the central issue in British sport historiography, while Canadians are
nearly equally concerned with other factors like colonialism, ethnicity and nationalism,
and Americans consider class not much more prominent than race and
ethnicity as a major feature of industrial capitalism and urbanization.