INTERNATIONAL ATHLETICS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXI, Issue 148, 23 June 1906, Page 15

INTERNATIONAL ATHLETICS.

» It is a little difficult (writes Mr. Beach Thomas, in tho Outlook) not to laugh at the Olympian games. Nearly all the elements of true comedy are gathered at Athens. The get-up, or make-up, of the candidates is in itself facetious enough to tickle Teufelsdrock. All over Attica, on the Bay of Phalerum, in the Stadium, at Marathon and "about the place," very earnest persons, who will boast of their victories in half a dozen countries, are doing inferior feats with singular success in many puerile games. An Olympian victor at lawn-tennis is a person that only Aristophanes could do justice to. But compare the Olympian games at their worst with that Olympian spectacle at- the Crystal Palace recently. It is a nice* question which would anger Diogenes the more. In both you have a people "savage and extremo" over a game of which they are not them-, sclyes players. The Greeks hooted losers. At the Crystal Palace mourningcards with thin black edges and a mocking epitaph were sold in great quantities to 'the supporters of Everton; and tho melancholy jest is repeated on all such occasions. Happily the games are better than their parentage. Subtract the extreme pomp, the sham classicism, the ludicrous gravity of it all, and the games are as good a sign of tho timeg as tho Cup-tie at the Palace is bad. I like the generality of tho occasion Games grew to be over-insular and professional among the Greeks as with us ; and every international meeting should help to restore the quality of amusement. Pheidippides, dying sweetly with, his end accomplished, is the best of athletes, better than Byron, because he. turned his athletics to patriotic use. Several English Pheidippides have bq played their parts. An old school ac^ quaintance of mine was given a'D.S.O. for leading a counter-attack across the football field in the Malakland campaign ; and the arena gave impetus to the charge. A three-miler whose paces, many had watched with admiration at the Iffley running ground and at Queen's Club exercised his powers of endurance to the best effect in a twelve-* mile run on tho veldt. The best of Oxford oars found his defence of a. farmhouse prosper because his little crew could, and the Boers could not, "stay the course," as the account said. Here is the Pheidippides principle of thq association of athletics with the nation's, affairs. For the furtherance of this athlotic principle the best thing in tho world is to come to acquaintance with, the calibre of other nations, and tho worst to grow absorbed jn an insular game. By the next Olympiad we may hope to see genuine sports, such as wrestling and fencing and shooting, given greater prominence ; and finally through this encouragement all such gameS develop a common set of rubs. That' would be a real gain to tho nations.