SCIENCE IN GAMES

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 70, 15 December 1928, Page 26

SCIENCE IN GAMES

In a scientific age even our sports, pastimes, and recreations tend to take on a scientific aspect. Our national games are becoming more highly scientific every year, in tlie sense that they demand intensive training and the greatest possible pace and skill of which the individual is capable (says the Edinburgh “Weekly Scotsman”). Modern playing fields, with their flawless surfaces which stand the wear and tear of a strenuous season, are due to scientific knowledge of soil culture,’ fertilisers, weed-killers, and worm-killers, and so on. Tlie equipment and clothing of sports has also been vastly improved by’ science, and especially by tlie scientific development of rubber for shoes, but handles, and balls for all games. Cheap flannels, shorts, and other clothing have been provided by scientific methods, and oven the least affluent player to-day can afford to appear on the field correctly dre'ssed for the game. In still another, and perhaps most important sense of all, science is influencing modern sport. This is in the development of tlie petrol engine, which has created an entirely new type of sport dependent on speed and mechanical ingenuity. Such new sports as motor racing, inotoy-boat racing, and aeroplane racing, are but a jeginning. Already we have the brand new and very exciting sport of dirt-track racing on motor-cycles, and no one can foresee what new sports may spring up through the piotor-engine and electricity. In any case, the tendency will be for gamgs to develop more and more speed and mechanical skill, and to be more and more cosmopolitan. The difference between waldiing :i cricket match on the. village green and following a big boxing match on the other side of tlie world by radio and television pretty well typifies the modern scientific development of speed.