ABSTRACT
From the 19th century and the emergence of modern sports competitions, athletes and scientists sought ways to enhance and improve performance relative to other athletes, countries, and races. While much of performance science was initially applied to race horses, increasingly understanding of the moving body, its capabilities and its limits engaged scientists internationally (12). While modern science was being applied to the body, anthropologists and ethnologists were attempting to understand differences between races and cultures. Ideas about temperament were applied to cultures and sports. For example, many English observers believed that the sport of cricket did not translate well outside of upper levels of society in the English-speaking world because the French, other Europeans, and native peoples did not have the patience or temperament to master the psychological aspects of the sport. Additionally, urbanization and the spread of disease, which led to sanitation movements and sewage systems for cities, raised alarm bells for European and North American observers by 1900 as they became more and more obsessed with the fear that the “white race” was in decline. After the South African (or Boer) War of 1899–1902, numerous commissions in Britain examined the state of working class British men and determined, in publications such as the Report of the Inter-departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration (1904), that the average health of British men had declined as a result of urbanization. Following on from this, defeats of British Isles national and regional rugby teams by New Zealand (1905), South Africa (1906, 1912), and Australia (1908), whose troops had been deemed to be more healthy than English ones, provided further “evidence” that it was only in colonial settings (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the American West in the US) where a rugged and rural lifestyle was thought to abound where the white race was potentially improving (20, 21).
