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The Palgrave Handbook
of Sport, Politics and Harm
Edited by
Stephen Wagg · Allyson M. Pollock
The Palgrave Handbook of Sport, Politics and Harm

“This book offers an impressive and thoughtful collection of essays written by top
scholars each interrogating the different ways in which diverse sporting cultures pro-
duce athlete pain, injury, and bodily damage. As such, this collection is essential
reading for those interested in understanding how sport is not simply about the cel-
ebration of achievement and victory, but also about the social, material, and political
agony of suffering and trauma.”
—Mary G. McDonald, Professor and Homer C. Rice Chair of Sport and Society,
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

“As an increasing number of sports are subjected to medical and legal scrutiny for
their short- and long-term outcomes, this timely volume rams home the point that
sports might not be so good for players after all. Offering an impressive spread of
pain-injury snapshots across the social sciences, public health and social policy disci-
plines, it proves what we have long suspected – pain and injury in sport do not only
result from the nature of the game, but from the ways that sports are organized, man-
aged and policed. In questioning the institutional innocence of sport, the volume
crosses the explanatory bridge from sport studies to victimology and underlines the
complexity of the central concept of consent in sports harm.”
—Kevin Young, Professor of Sociology, University of Calgary, Canada

“This is an essential guide to some of the most important questions facing sport
today. It brings together a wide range of experts who interrogate harm, injury and
physical abuse in sport from a variety of insightful perspectives. This is a ground-
breaking and timely book that should be on the shelves of every sports historian,
sociologist and policy-maker.”
—Tony Collins, Emeritus Professor of History, De Montfort University, UK
Stephen Wagg • Allyson M. Pollock
Editors

The Palgrave
Handbook of Sport,
Politics and Harm
Editors
Stephen Wagg Allyson M. Pollock
International Centre for Sport History Institute of Health and Society
and Culture Newcastle University
De Montfort University Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
Leicester, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-72825-0    ISBN 978-3-030-72826-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72826-7

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 Contents

Part I Bodily Damage and Pre- and Early Industrial Sport   1


The Perils of Rewarding Toughness: Honor, Injury, and Death in
the Athletics of the Ancient World  3
Michael Poliakoff


‘Beastly Furie, and Exstreme Violence’: Pain, Injury and Death
Resulting from Football and Other Ball Games Played in the
British Isles Before the Reformation 17
Ariel Hessayon


Violence, Injury and the Politics of the Evolving Football Codes 71
Liam O’Callaghan


“Though He Was Evidently Suffering Great Pain, He Bore It Well”:
Public Discourse on Benefits, Risk, and Injury in North American
Wrestling, 1880 to 1914 87
C. Nathan Hatton

Part II The NFL: Politics, Injury, and American National Identity  113


Inflaming the Civic Temper: Progress, Violence, and Concussion
in Early American Football115
Emily A. Harrison

v
vi Contents

 Problem that Cries Out for Standards: Football Helmets,

A
Conceptions of Risk, and the National Commission on Product
Safety, 1961–1970141
Kathleen Bachynski


Lights Out: Concussion Research, the National Football League,
and Employer Duty of Care157
Lucia Trimbur


Race and Injury in American Football173
Peter Benson, José Figueroa-López, Richard Kuehn, Andrew Whitaker,
and Adam Rugg

Part III Sporting Females, Sexuality, and the Politics of Injury 185


Injury at the Extreme: Alison Hargreaves, Mountaineering and
Motherhood187
Carol A. Osborne


Gendered Bodies, Gendered Injuries207
Kath Woodward


The Not So Glamorous World of Women’s Wrestling223
Karen Corteen


Pride, Prejudice and Death: The Emile Griffith Story245
Ruby Finklestein

Part IV Sport as Transport: Horse, Cycle, and Motor Racing

and the Politics of Safety 265


Runners, Riders and Risk: Safety Issues in the History of
Horseracing267
Patrick Sharman


‘Dishing Out the Pain’ in Professional Cycling293
Peter Bramham
 Contents vii

 Was Ironic that He Should Die in Bed: Injury, Death and the
It
Politics of Safety in the History of Motor Racing309
Stephen Wagg

Part V Sport, Injury, and the Culture of Late Capitalism 329


The Death of Jordan McNair: The Inevitability of the Avoidable
Life-­Threatening Injury331
Ryan King-White and David L. Andrews


From Body Snatchers to Brain Banks: The Cadaver as
Commodity and the Sports-Concussion “Crisis”349
Sean Brayton and Michelle T. Helstein

 the Frontlines: Black Boys and Injury in Basketball365

On
Scott N. Brooks, Stacey Flores, and Anthony J. Weems

 Power to Your Elbow? Injury in US Baseball and the Politics of

All
‘Tommy John Surgery’385
Stephen Wagg

 Injury “On Brand”? Examining the Contexts of the CrossFit

Is
Injury Connection405
Shaun Edmonds


‘This Must Be Done Right, So We Don’t Lose the Income’: Medical
Care and Commercial Imperatives in Mixed Martial Arts429
Alex Channon, Christopher R. Matthews, and Mathew Hillier


Vanguards on the Starting Line: Race, Work, and Dissent in Sport
Dystopian Films from Rollerball to The Hunger Game445
Nicholas Rickards

Part VI Sport and Injury: Case Studies 461


Injury and Olympics Politics, 1896–1988463
Lee Hill and Helen Jefferson Lenskyj
viii Contents

 and Starts: Re-examining the Mystery of Brazil’s Ronaldo and

Fits
the Rumours Swirling Around his Controversial Role in the World
Cup Final of 1998481
John Sugden and Peter Watt


The Cricket Pitch as “Unsafe Workplace”: Sports Culture and the
Death of Phillip Hughes487
David Rowe


Muhammad Ali, Sport Celebrity, and Perceptions of Parkinson’s
Disease505
Nicole Eugene


‘Snipers Stop Play’: The Israeli Defence Force and the Shooting
of Palestinian Footballers515
Jon Dart

Part VII Sport, Harm, and the Politics of Wellbeing 535


The Politics of Safeguarding and Protecting Children in Sport
in England537
Joanne McVeigh and Melanie Lang


Sidelined: Boys, Sport, and Depression555
Michael Atkinson and Kristina Smith


Injuries in Schools’ Rugby: Occasional Niggles and Scrapes?573
Allyson M. Pollock and Graham Kirkwood

Index607
 Notes on Contributors

David L. Andrews is Professor of Kinesiology in the Center for Health

Equity at the University of Maryland, USA.
Michael Atkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical
Education at the University of Toronto, Canada.
Kathleen Bachynski is a Rudin Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of
Medical Ethics at New York University, USA.
Peter Benson is a professor in, and chair of, the Department of Anthropology
at the University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, USA. His latest book is
Tobacco Capitalism: Growers, Migrant Workers, and the Changing Face of a
Global Industry (2012).
Peter Bramham is an independent scholar, former Reader in Leisure Studies
at Leeds Beckett University, UK, and a keen cyclist.
Sean Brayton is an associate professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and
Physical Education at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada.
Scott N. Brooks is an associate professor with the T. Denny Sanford School
of Social and Family Dynamics, an academic unit of the College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences, at Arizona State University, USA, and associate director of
the Global Sport Institute there.
Alex Channon is Senior Lecturer in Physical Education and Sport Studies at
the University of Brighton, UK, and is the co-founder of the combat sports-­
based anti-violence initiative, Love Fighting Hate Violence.

ix
x Notes on Contributors

Karen Corteen lectures in the School of Law at Liverpool John Moores

University, UK.
Jon Dart is Senior Lecturer in Sports Policy and Sociology in the Carnegie
School of Sport at Leeds Beckett University, UK. With Stephen Wagg he
edited Sport, Protest and Globalisation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Shaun Edmonds is a graduate student in the School of Public Health at the
University of Maryland, USA.
Nicole Eugene is Assistant Professor of Communication in the School of
Arts and Sciences at the University of Houston-Victoria, USA.
José Figueroa-López is Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the
Washington University in St Louis, USA.
Ruby Finklestein is one of UK’s leading sportswriters and until 2020 was
Senior Lecturer in Journalism at University of Brighton, UK. As Rob Steen,
he is the author of many books, including Sonny Liston: His Life, Strife and the
Phantom Punch (London, 2008).
Stacey Flores is a research technician in the School of Criminology &
Criminal Justice at Arizona State University, USA.
Emily A. Harrison is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of the History
of Science at Harvard University, USA.
C. Nathan Hatton is a historian teaching at Lakehead University,
Ontario, Canada.
Michelle T. Helstein is an associate dean in the Faculty of Kinesiology and
Physical Education at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada.
Ariel Hessayon is Reader in Early Modern History at Goldsmiths, University
of London, UK. He is the author of ‘Gold Tried in the Fire’: The prophet
TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution (Aldershot).
Lee Hill is pursuing a Ph.D. in Exercise Science at the University of Cape
Town, South Africa.
Mathew Hillier is a researcher and a Master’s student in the Centre for
Sports Performance at Leeds Beckett University, UK.
Ryan King-White is an associate professor at Towson University,
Maryland, USA.
 Notes on Contributors xi

Graham Kirkwood is a senior research associate in the Institute of Health

and Society at the Newcastle University, UK.
Richard Kuehn is Professor of Law at Washington University in St.
Louis, USA.
Melanie Lang is Senior Lecturer in Child Protection in Sport in the
Department of Social Sciences at Edge Hill University, UK.
Helen Jefferson Lenskyj is a Professor Emerita at the University of Toronto,
Canada, and, arguably, the leading critical academic writer on the Olympic
industry. She is the author of many books on the politics of sport, the latest of
which are Gender Politics and the Olympic Industry (2013), Sexual Diversity
and the Sochi 2014 Olympics (2014)—both published by Palgrave Macmillan—
and The Olympic Games: A Critical Approach (2020).
Christopher R. Matthews is Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Sport at the
University of Brighton, UK. With Alex Channon he edited Global Perspectives
on Women in Combat Sports (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Joanne McVeigh is Senior Lecturer in Physical Education and School Sport
at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK.
Liam O’Callaghan is Senior Lecturer in History at Liverpool Hope
University, UK. He’s the author of Rugby in Munster: A Social and Cultural
History (2011).
Carol A. Osborne is an independent scholar and consultant in sport history.
She previously taught the history of sport at Cumbria and Leeds Beckett uni-
versities, UK.
Michael Poliakoff is a classicist who taught previously at Georgetown
University, George Washington University, Hillsdale College, the University
of Illinois at Chicago, and Wellesley College. He is now president of the
American Council of Trustees and Alumni, based in Washington DC, and
teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He is one of the
world’s leading authorities on ancient sport and the author of Combat Sports
in the Ancient World.
Allyson M. Pollock is a professor of clinical public health in the Population
Health Sciences Institute at Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK.
Nicholas Rickards received his doctorate from the University of Lethbridge,
Canada, for his work on films with a dystopian theme. He now teaches at
G.S. Lakie Middle School in Lethbridge.
xii Notes on Contributors

David Rowe is Professor Emeritus of Cultural Research in the Institute for

Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia.
Adam Rugg is Assistant Professor of Communication at Fairfield University,
Connecticut, USA. He researches the relationship between sport, media, and
social issues.
Patrick Sharman is a doctoral student in the School of Biosciences at the
University of Exeter, UK. His doctoral research addresses the genetics of per-
formance and health traits in thoroughbred racehorses.
Kristina Smith is a graduate student in the Faculty of Kinesiology and
Physical Education at the University of Toronto, Canada. Michael Atkinson
and Smith work in the university’s Suffering, Pain, and Ethics Laboratory
(SPEL), which is devoted to the study of suffering, pain, violence, healing,
and ethics in physical and health cultures.
John Sugden is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Brighton, UK. He
and his colleague Alan Tomlinson are the world’s leading academic writers on
the politics of FIFA. Their most recent book on this theme is Football,
Corruption and Lies (2017).
Lucia Trimbur is Associate Professor of Sociology at John Jay College and
the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA.
Stephen Wagg retired as Professor of Sport and Society at Leeds Beckett
University, UK, in 2019. He is an Honorary Fellow in the International
Centre for Sport History and Culture at De Montfort University, Leicester,
and a visiting professor at the Newcastle University, both in the UK.
Peter Watt is an associate professor in the School of Sport and Service
Management at the University of Brighton, UK.
Anthony J. Weems is a doctoral student in Sport Management at Texas
A&M University, USA. His research focuses on issues of race, power, and
politics in and through the sport organisational setting.
Andrew Whitaker is a computer scientist at Washington University in St
Louis, USA.
Kath Woodward is a Professor Emerita at The Open University, UK. Her
most recent books are Planet Sport (London) and Sex Power and the Games
(Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan), both published in 2012.
 List of Figures

‘Beastly Furie, and Exstreme Violence’: Pain, Injury and Death

Resulting from Football and Other Ball Games Played
in the British Isles Before the Reformation
Fig. 1 University College, Oxford, MS 165, Bede, ‘Life of St Cuthbert’,
(twelfth century) fol. 8. https://www.univ.ox.ac.uk/news/life-­
cuthbert-­venerable-­bede/. (Reproduced with the kind permission of
The Master and Fellows of University College Oxford) 23
Fig. 2 Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, MS W.88, ‘Book of Hours’ [Franco-
Flemish] (c.1300–1310), fols. 59v, 70r. http://www.thedigitalwal-
ters.org/Data/WaltersManuscripts/W88/data/W.88/sap/
W88_000124_sap.jpg, http://www.thedigitalwalters.org/Data/
WaltersManuscripts/W88/data/W.88/sap/W88_000145_sap.jpg24
Fig. 3 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Bodleian 264, ‘Romance of
Alexander’ (1338–44), (a) part 1 fol. 22r and (b) part 1 fol. 63r 25
Fig. 4 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 62, ‘Book of Hours’ (late
fourteenth century), fol. 96r 25
Fig. 5 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 211, Petrus Comestor, ‘Bible
historiale’ (first quarter of fourteenth century), fol. 258v 26
Fig. 6 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 135, ‘Book of Hours’
(first half of sixteenth century), fol. 2r 31
Fig. 7 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 135, ‘Book of Hours’
(first half of sixteenth century), fol. 7r 31
Fig. 8 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 135, ‘Book of Hours’
(first half of sixteenth century), fol. 87v 32
Fig. 9 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 62, ‘Book of Hours’
(late fourteenth century), fol. 122r 32

xiii
xiv List of Figures

Fig. 10 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 276, ‘Book of Hours’

(second half of fifteenth century), fol. 12r 33
Fig. 11 (a) The geography of ball games in the British Isles before the
reformation. (b) North of River Trent. (c) South of River Trent 52
Fig. 12 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 5, ‘Psalter’ (c.1320–1330),
fol. 123r 56
Fig. 13 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 6, ‘Psalter’ (c.1320–1330),
fol. 148r 57
Fig. 14 Misericord, Gloucester Cathedral (mid-fourteenth century) [No.
33]. www.misericords.co.uk/images/Gloucester/Gloucester 33.13.
JPG. (Copyright Dominic Strange © 2021) 61
Fig. 15 (a) Misericord, All Souls College, Oxford (mid-fifteenth century).
http://www.misericords.co.uk/images/All%20Souls-­Oxford/N19.
jpg. (Copyright Dominic Strange © 2021). (b) Misericord, All
Souls College, Oxford (mid-fifteenth century) [detail]. (Copyright
Dominic Strange © 2021) 62

Injuries in Schools’ Rugby: Occasional Niggles and Scrapes?

Fig. 1 Reproduced with permission from the England Professional
Rugby Injury Surveillance Project 2017–18 Season Report
(England Professional Rugby Injury Surveillance Project Steering
Group, 2018) 574
 Sport, Politics, and Harm: Introduction

Here we explain the book’s origin and its purpose.

The book emerged initially out of Allyson Pollock’s prolonged campaign
over several years to address the high incidence of injuries in British schools’
rugby by placing restrictions on tackling. This campaign resulted, among
other things, in a book (Tackling Rugby: What Every Parent Should Know About
Injuries, Pollock, 2014a) and a symposium at Barts and the London School of
Medicine and Dentistry in 2014, in which Stephen Wagg participated. The
idea for a book specifically about the politics of sport injury was prompted
largely by the often-hostile response to Pollock’s initiative. Although the cam-
paign had a seemingly unimpeachable motive and a good deal of support
(especially from members of the medical profession, concerned parents, and
some journalists), elsewhere—in the tabloid and broadsheet press, among
right-wing commercial broadcasters and officers, medical and otherwise, of
sports organisations—this response eventually assumed the form of a mini-­
moral panic (Cohen, 2002). Typically, these panics occur when society’s dom-
inant core values are threatened by ‘folk devils’—simply, negative stereotypes,
suitably amplified by the media. Over the years folk devils have often been
drawn from youth culture (teddy boys, mods, rockers, skinheads, lager louts,
ravers, etc.) although the best example of a folk devil in UK media depictions
is almost certainly the Labour politician Jeremy Corbyn, who was treated
with sustained hostility following his election to the party leadership in 2015
(see, e.g., Cammaerts et al., 2016)
The moral panic—in this case, effectively a bout of hostile reactions to a
perceived threat on the part of elite media and sport organisations—revealed
a number of hitherto largely unacknowledged political attitudes towards
sport. Peter Robinson, whose son Benjamin had died of a brain injury

xv
xvi Sport, Politics, and Harm: Introduction

sustained playing rugby, was recruited to assure readers of The Times that a
ban on tackling was not the way to go (Broadbent, 2017).1 In Yorkshire, his-
torically a rugby stronghold, it was reported that: ‘Leading rugby coaches in
Huddersfield have warned that attempts to restrict the sport for children to
non-contact games would have a detrimental effect on future players … and
even the national team’s prospects’ (Earnshaw, 2017). The Daily Mail, having
given Prof. Pollock a sympathetic hearing in 2014, when she was billed
respectfully as someone ‘who’s spent a decade studying the sport’s devastating
injuries’ (Pollock, 2014b), two years later turned on her and her colleagues,
recasting them as an assortment of folk devils with the headline: ‘What
(rugby) balls! “Experts” are demanding a ban on tackles in under-18s rugby.
But as we reveal, they’re a motley scrum of lefties, gender obsessives and gay
campaigners with a worryingly insidious agenda’ (Mount, 2016). In September
2017, Pollock was hectored by right-wing presenter Piers Morgan on the tele-
vision programme Good Morning Britain thus: ‘You just suggested touch
rugby is a viable alternative to rugby? The whole point of rugby is to collide.
Have you ever watched rugby?’ He then demanded to know ‘whether she
would ban hockey sticks from hockey, punching from boxing and ropes from
the tug of war in case kids got burns’ (Kelly, 2017).2 (For a full account of the
campaign mounted by Prof. Pollock and others see Chap. 30 of this book.)

Sport Injury: History and Politics

As the history of these debates (much of it set out in this book) shows, anyone
publicly proposing restrictions of this kind is likely, if unwittingly, to have
kicked over a political hornets’ nest and can therefore expect an unsolicited
postbag (letters, emails, tweets, etc.) of (usually angry) responses. And it rap-
idly became clear from some of the arrivals in Prof. Pollock’s Inbox that
attitudes to questions such as this had not necessarily moved on from the
1950s, or even the nineteenth century. An excerpt from one message, sent by
a retired British barrister, shows this perfectly:

1
This, it must be said, was not the end of the story for Mr Robinson and his family. They were involved
in a protracted and expensive legal dispute over the preventability of Benjamin’s death (see https://www.
irishtimes.com/sport/rugby/family-fights-on-in-seven-year-legal-battle-over-son-s-rugby-
death-1.3645029 Access 24th November 2020) and, while still supporting tackling, Peter Robinson has
become an advocate of concussion management.
2
The interview, which took place on 26 September, can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=gRwaQs7CnNc.
 Sport, Politics, and Harm: Introduction xvii

I’m a 66-year-old who played American Football and Rugby at the collegiate
and club levels. To say I suffered severe injuries at both games would be an
understatement. […] Now before you go and think I’m probably some knuckle
dragging Neanderthal with an IQ of 80 I will let you know I’m retired from over
40 years of practicing law. My IQ is at the upper levels. I’m no dummy! What
you fail to recognize, and possibly are by genetic predisposition incapable of
recognizing, are the values and lessons both these sports impart on their partici-
pants. The element of violence is possibly the linchpin of the lessons. Without
the element of violence and its attendant injuries the risk reduction reduces the
“price to possibly be paid” each time one steps on the pitch or field. These games
are training our leaders of tomorrow. The very same leaders who might find
themselves leading others into armed conflict. I hope that is never the case but
given the history of mankind it’s highly unlikely we will not see such conflict.
When we do, I sure hope whoever is leading my soldiers got a taste of a violent
sport as opposed to a watered down version when his or her day occurs. I’m sure
your Lord Tennyson would agree lest he probably would have never penned the
Charge of the Light Brigade. I’m sure our General Patton would label your posi-
tion pure poppy cocky!.

This conviction that violent, injury-inducing sports should be seen as a

means to the breeding leaders of men—in battle and elsewhere—has a long
history.
Many3 of the antecedents of modern sports lie in Britain’s elite private
schools and, by today’s standards, they were very dangerous. The in-house
public school games from which modern rugby was developed were rough-­
and-­tumble affairs and, in the early 1870s, following the establishment of the
modern rugby code in 1871, there was a prolonged dispute over the practice
of ‘hacking’—tripping and/or kicking an opponent on the shins in order to
dispossess him. As the game’s leading historian Tony Collins records, hacking
had been integral to the game played at Rugby School where pupils chose to
wear white socks so that the blood drawn could be more clearly seen: ‘blood-
ied shins were a badge of honour’ (Collins, 2009: 75). Indeed, when in 1870
The Times published a letter from ‘A Surgeon’ expressing disquiet over the
number of injuries caused by hacking, angry Rugby old boys either disputed
his claims or insisted that the practice was perfectly legitimate. Leading rugby
players of that time, such as Francis Maule Campbell of Blackheath, argued
that to abolish hacking would take ‘all the courage and pluck out of the

3
The following section is adapted from a blog titled ‘Sport Injury: Tackling Life in a Competitive Society’,
written by Stephen Wagg on 18 October 2017 for Leeds Beckett University, where he was a professor at
the time. The blog can be read in full here: https://www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/blogs/expert-opinion/2017/10/
sport-injury-tackling-life-in-a-competitive-society/ Access 29th September 2020.
xviii Sport, Politics, and Harm: Introduction

game’—‘pluck’ being perceived as a trait setting British males apart from lesser
men such as their French counterparts (Collins, 2009: 19 and 77; Chandler,
1996: 13–31).
Tough sport expressed a similar nationalism in the United States, where,
in the 1880s, rugby was fashioned into a markedly rougher game deemed
by its proponents to be more in keeping with rugged American national
identity. Deaths and serious injury in American college football were so
frequent that there were calls for its abolition. These calls were headed off
in 1905 by President Theodore Roosevelt, who counselled moderate reform
so as to salvage the ‘necessary roughness’ entailed in American masculinity
(see Oriard, 2011: 80–105; Emily Harrison’s chapter in this book). Those
who sought to do away with this game and its ‘homicidal features’ were
soon, and have remained, in retreat. (A number of further chapters in this
book explore the history and politics of injury in the US National Football
League (NFL)—notably those by Bachynski, Trimbur, Benson et al. and
Brayton and Helstein.)
In Britain today it is scarcely easier to confront the physical dangers of sport
than it was in the United States in the early twentieth century.
Among the many folk devils thrown up by Conservative Party strategists in
the early 1990s, and still retailed by the popular press, is the ‘trendy teacher’
who teaches through praise, recognises no wrong answer, and insists that ‘all
must have prizes’.4 Prime Minister John Major drew on this confection when,
to loud cheers, he announced to the Conservative Party Conference of 1994
that team sport was ‘part of the British instinct’ and that the government
would be ‘changing the National Curriculum to put competitive games back
at the heart of school life’ (www.johnmajor.co.uk/page1147.html Access 9th
March 2016). It was also soon clear that the government was creating an ideo-
logical climate in which a policy shift towards elite sport and centres of excel-
lence, at the expense of sport for recreation, could be accomplished. This
policy shift was announced in 1995 with ‘Sport: Raising the Game’, a strategy
document signalling that the country should now seek as a priority to be
among the medals in top international sport (Department of National
Heritage, 1995). Thereafter, increased preference was given in the curricula of
British state schools to competitive sports and traditional team games (Penney
& Evans, 1997).
In 2002 Tony Blair’s ‘New’ Labour administration endorsed a further pol-
icy document called ‘Game Plan’, affirming once again that priority would be

4
See, for example, Phillips (1996)—a book whose central arguments were strongly disputed by leading
educationists, such as Wragg (1996).
 Sport, Politics, and Harm: Introduction xix

given to elite sport, promising support for bids to host mega events, such as
the Olympics, and accepting that such events, although promoting a ‘feel-
good factor’, would not be expected to lead to greater sports participation
(Department of Media, Culture and Sport/Strategy Unit, 2002). (Perhaps
predictably, when London bid successfully for the Olympic Games of 2012 a
publicity campaign insisted that the Games would inspire generations to take
up physical activity—see Lee (2006)—but there is scant evidence that was the
case—see Wagg, 2015: 167–181).
Two important things have happened since Major’s speech.
First, competitive sport has become a political shibboleth with Labour MPs
often taunted for their supposed opposition to it. (Labour, sadly, have been all
too willing parties to this charade: in Beijing at the handover of the Olympics
in 2008, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown proposed to slay the imaginary
monster. ‘We want to encourage competitive sports in schools’, he announced,
‘not the “medals for all” culture we have seen in previous years’ (Summers, 2016).)
Second, a nexus of quangos (semi-public administrative organisations),
individual governing bodies, centres of excellence, and corporate partners
now clusters around British elite sport and is seen as supporting the nation’s
flagships as they sail forth into the next Olympics, the upcoming cricket Tests,
and the rugby Six Nations competition.
To raise questions about the dangers of injury in children’s sport, or, for
that matter, in any sport, is ultimately to collide not only with this nexus but
with older-established ideas of gender and nation and with much of what
passes for contemporary political common sense. Sport, after all, as Tony
Collins has observed, is ‘a metaphor for, and a reflection of, everyday life in
capitalist society’ (Collins, 2013: 5).
The growth since the 1930s of variously commercialised, nationalistic,
science-­based, hyper-masculine, and mass-mediated sport long ago inspired a
body of critical scholarship predicated, on way or another, on the alienating
nature of sport as a project in modern (and postmodern) societies. Alienation
here is a notion that draws on nineteenth-century philosophy, including the
work of Karl Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
(Marx, 1959) and it entails the proposition that contemporary sportspeople
are made strangers to their, and sport’s, true purpose, namely the gaining of
pleasure and self-fulfilment. Top sportspeople had become instruments,
labouring to produce outcomes for their employers, their national bodies and
administrators, their sponsors, and the paying public. An earlier marker here
was put down by the French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher
Jean-Marie Brohm, whose Sport: A Prison of Measured Time came out in 1978
(Brohm, 1978). Professional sportspeople, said Brohm, were nowadays often
xx Sport, Politics, and Harm: Introduction

deployed, in effect, as human sandwich boards; moreover, he noted, competi-

tive sport had also taken deep root in the communist countries and these
baleful trends were not, therefore, confined to the formally capitalist world
(Brohm, 1978: 176, 79–80). Indeed, it might be noted that the Soviet Union
was one of the first countries in the world to have what was, in effect, a min-
istry for sport—the All-Union Committee on Physical Culture and Sports
Affairs, established in 1936 (Riordan, 1980: 126). Moreover, in 1986 the
American academic John Hoberman, probably the leading writer on the
theme of sport and alienation, could lament that sport was ‘the one interna-
tional culture which is developing in accordance with a Communist model’
(Hoberman, 1986: 11). Sportspeople, following the interventions of science
and commerce, were now seen, to borrow the title of Hoberman’s subsequent
book, primarily as ‘mortal engines’ (Hoberman, 1992).5
The widely preferred belief in Western countries remains that these mortal
engines were fashioned and driven only in the communist bloc of countries,
but the following example (unintentionally) shows alienated sport, albeit of
varying kinds, to have been incubated on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’.
In 2006, the UK’s right-wing broadsheet, the Daily Telegraph, interviewed
the British ex-Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies, asking her to revisit her
rivalry with Petra Schneider, who had won a gold medal (against Davies’ sil-
ver) in the 400 metres individual relay at the Moscow Olympics of 1980.
Schneider had represented East Germany—described in the paper as ‘the
German Democratic (Ha!) Republic’—and was later found to have been sub-
ject to a damaging state doping programme. Davies said she had only sympa-
thy for Schneider, who had been administered the drugs without her
knowledge and was now an ailing mother of one, living in a small council flat,
and taking pills for her heart which prevented her having further children. ‘I
got the impression Petra’s medals didn’t mean that much to her’, said Davies,
‘they were simply a reminder of why she was so very poorly’. However, Davies
and her interviewer make plain that, for Davies, medals were no less a means
to an end than Schneider’s: ‘[I won] the silver medal and have had a very good
TV career on the back of that. Ann Osgerby, who works as a tax inspector, was
fourth in the 100 metres butterfly behind three East Germans. Ann’s whole
life would have been very different if she’d received the gold.’ As for the alien-
ated nature of her own swimming, Davies, instructed by her ‘disciplinarian’
father, had followed a training regime of ‘six hours a day, seven days a week,
frequently covering 80,000 metres a week in her quest to become a

5
The section on alienation has been adapted from ‘Alienation’, Chap. 1 of Key Concepts in Sport Studies,
written by Stephen Wagg: see Wagg et al. (2009).
 Sport, Politics, and Harm: Introduction xxi

champion’. ‘I fell out of a tree when I was 11, and even though I broke both
arms, I continued training for three months with plastic bags over the plasters.
[…] That’s why I was so desperate to retire. I had no love of swimming left.’
She now made sure that ‘my children enjoy a far more diverse life than I did
at their age’ (Philip, 2006).
Davies’ testimony thus also hints at the corrosive subcultures that surround
sport in many contemporary societies, wherein coaches and aggressively aspi-
rant parents impose harsh training regimes on their young charges—‘I’m
seven years old’, recalls tennis player Andre Agassi, for example, in his mem-
oir, ‘talking to myself, because I’m scared and because I’m the only person
who listens to me’, describing childhood dictated by a father who ‘yells every-
thing twice, sometimes three times’ and made him hit 2500 tennis balls a day
(Agassi, 2009: 27–28). We think also here of the brutalising, win-at-all-costs
regimes imposed by gymnastics coaches, against which young, female gym-
nasts, often taunted for their weight or body shape and suffering from eating
disorders, have spoken out (see, e.g., Sey, 2009; Adams & Kavanagh, 2020).
And we might add that, however she may subsequently have fared as in her
subsequent career, Ann Osgerby had to retire from swimming in 1984, with
recurrent tendonitis in both shoulders—an injury common to elite swimmers
(https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Ann_Osgerby: Access 1st October 2020; Sein
et al., 2010).
Alienated sport, as this post-Olympic vignette demonstrates, appreciably
increases the possibility of harm (physical, emotional, etc.) to those practising
it, wherever they are practising it. Historically, this alienation was territory, in
both philosophy and politics, on which progressives and traditionalists could
find broad agreement: it was after all, a fundament both of Victorian gentle-
manly, anti-commercial (albeit frequently hypocritical and socially exclusive)
amateurism (see, e.g., Allison, 2001: 3–16) and of internationalist worker
sport (Riordan, 2008) that sport must not place competitiveness above fel-
lowship (or comradeship), the refreshment and ‘re-creation’ of the individual,
or the ties of community. In the latter connection, we might also cite the
‘Friendship First, Competitive Second’ diplomatic initiative of the People’s
Republic of China in the early 1970s (Guanhua, 2003).
Today the voices of public health and ‘wellbeing’ are more likely to be
countered by corporate interests, trading variously in the rhetoric of national
imperative, aggressive masculinity, or neoliberal, ‘nobody-puts-a-gun-to-­­
their-heads’ individual choice. As economic problems, particularly in the
major capitalist societies, have mounted, these political fissures have wid-
ened—the escalating ‘concussion crisis’ in the US National Football League
(once again, extensively contextualised in this book) is a leading example here.
xxii Sport, Politics, and Harm: Introduction

Moreover, the global onset of the virus COVID-19 early in 2020 has
brought the confrontation between the interests of the corporate-sports-­
media complex and considerations of public health into sharper focus. This
was especially the case in countries where neoliberal policies and philosophies
were most entrenched and, in several instances, improbably right-wing figures
had gained high office. Take, for example, Brazil, where far right retired army
officer Jair Bolsonaro became the nation’s 38th president in 2018. In mid-­
March 2020, with Brazil’s death rate rising and state governors shutting down
non-essential businesses, Bolsonaro poured scorn on such restrictions and
specified the need for sport to continue: ‘When you ban football and other
things, you fall into hysteria. Banning this and that isn’t going to contain the
spread’ (Charner et al., 2020). In June, with deaths from COVID-19 running
at 1000 a day in Brazil, two of the country’s leading clubs, Botafogo and
Fluminense, said they would defy an order to play issued by the Rio de Janeiro
football federation: ‘Botafogo president Nelson Mufarrej called the ruling
“disconnected from reality”, and both clubs said they planned to take legal
action on health and safety grounds’ (Sky Sports, 2020). By July 71,000
Brazilians had died of COVID. Football went ahead nonetheless, but the
south Brazil derby game between Avai and Chapecoense was called off when
14 players were found to have the virus (Downie, 2020). In August the
Brazilian Série A, or main league, resumed; this was perceived as ‘a big victory
for President Jair Bolsonaro’ while TV commentator (and former Brazilian
team coach) Walter Casagrande reflected: ‘We can’t forget what is happening
in this country. We will reach 100,000 deaths, a scary number, and soccer is
on. I feel embarrassed about this situation, but it is my job. I am here to talk
about soccer’ (Savarese, 2020). In September, Flamengo, based in Rio de
Janeiro and one of Brazil’s wealthiest clubs and chaired by oil and gas execu-
tive Rodolfo Landim, overturned an order by a Brazilian labour court to post-
pone their away fixture with Sao Paulo club Palmeiras, despite having 36 staff
members, including 19 players, infected with the virus. Landim also success-
fully lobbied Bolsonaro to be allowed to admit 30% of the usual intake of
spectators (Marshall, 2020). By the end of September 2020 Brazil had reached
145,000 deaths from COVID (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
country/brazil/: access 6th October 2020)
In March 2020 public health professionals similarly expressed their dismay
when the UK Conservative government permitted crowds of over 50,000 to
attend the Cheltenham Festival of horseracing and the Champions League
 Sport, Politics, and Harm: Introduction xxiii

football match between Liverpool and Atlético Madrid6 (Sabbagh et al., 2020)
and the following month professional cyclists were told bluntly that, if the
annual Tour de France (scheduled for June) did not go ahead, the entire sport
faced ‘economic meltdown’ (Coverdale, 2020). Since lockdown had been
imposed in France, on 17 March, around 15,000 people had died of the virus
(https://sportstar.thehindu.com/other-­sports/tour-­de-­france-­cancellation-­
could-­cause-­cycling-­economic-­crisis-­coronavirus/article31336140.ece Access
2nd October 2020). The race went ahead. Around half of the annual turnover
for the Tour (around £116 million) comes from broadcasting rights; most of
the rest is revenue from advertising and sponsorship (Clark, 2020). In early
October, the London Marathon also went ahead, with a field consisting only
of elite athletes; when it was over exhausted athletes were obliged by photog-
raphers to hold up blankets bearing the logo of the race’s sponsors Virgin
Money. The winner’s coach was at home, suffering from COVID-19
(Rowbottom, 2020).

Sport, Injury, and Social Research

Turning once again to this book and its purpose, as a matter for scholarly
research, the harm that sport can inflict on its practitioners has not had the
attention that it might have. As Kevin Young suggests, while the health-giving
benefits of sport have ample literature, ‘the less healthy, injurious conse-
quences of sport have been far less widely researched, certainly by sociologists’
(Young, 2004b: xi). This may be partly because appraisals of alienated sport
have been pitched at a greater level of generality—as, for instance, with French
journalist Marc Perelman’s blanket condemnation of Barbaric Sport (Perelman,
2012)—or because writers have concentrated on other aspects of corporate
sport, such as the commercial-legal juggernaut that is the modern Olympics
(see, e.g., Tomlinson & Whannel, 1984; Lenskyj, 2002, 2020;7 Boykoff,
2013) or the questionable political dealings of the world football’s governing
body, FIFA (Sugden & Tomlinson, 1998).
It may also have been because sport injury, as a research theme, has been
widely seen as the province of those practising ‘sports medicine’, a field which
has, of course, grown in tandem with alienated sport itself. A pioneer of the
sociological study of sport injury was the American sociologist Howard
6
These were both assumed by experts to have been ‘superspreading events’ for the virus—see
Ashton (2020).
7
Helen Lenskyj has written widely on the Olympics. Her first and her latest book are listed in the refer-
ences, but full details of her writing can be found on her website: http://www.helenlenskyj.ca/books.html.
xxiv Sport, Politics, and Harm: Introduction

L. Nixon II, who authored a series of articles in the early 1990s (the first being
Nixon, 1993).
Of the ensuing companion literature, written in broadly the same vein, one
work stands out—Kevin Young’s Sporting Bodies, Damaged Selves, an edited
collection of essays, published in 2004 (Young, 2004a). The book’s contribu-
tors analyse the ‘no-pain-no-gain’ cultures of the sporting world and the nor-
malisation of risk (risk is a recurrent theme in the book, indicating the
widespread influence of the work of the German sociologist Ulrich Beck on
the ‘risk society’—Beck, 1992); the reflections and coping strategies of ath-
letes who have experienced serious injury; and the various repercussions and
after effects of sport pain and injury.
Our book runs largely parallel to these endeavours, seeking principally to
show how sport injury—the incidence, the idea, or the prospect of it—has
become politically contentious in various sports, in diverse places, at different
historical junctures, and in relation to a range of questions, including issues of
class, gender, ethnicity and race, sexuality, political ideology and national
identity, health and wellbeing, childhood and animal rights.
The book is organised as follows.
Part I, ‘Bodily Damage and Pre- and Early Industrial Sport’, consists of
four chapters relating to sport injury in either pre- and or early industrial
sport. These chapters are important because, as with the Olympics, myths of
the past are often invoked to support current practice. In Chap. 1 Michael
Poliakoff examines the place of honour, injury, and death in the athletics of
the Ancient World. Chapter 2, by Ariel Hessayon, looks at pain, injury, and
death in pre-industrial British and Irish football. Liam O’Callaghan discusses
violence, injury, and the politics of the evolving football codes in Chap. 3,
using the Irish experience as his prime focus. And Chap. 4, by C. Nathan
Hatton, is an account of early twentieth-century attitudes towards injury in
rough North American combat sports.
Part II, titled ‘The NFL: Politics, Injury, and American National Identity’,
is devoted to the US National Football League and historic debates over player
safety. It consists of four chapters. In Chap. 5 Emily A. Harrison analyses the
national conversation over college football in the early 1900s from a public
health perspective, linking it to the US Progressive movement, spanning the
1890s and the 1920s. In doing so she provides an appropriate scene-setter for
the following three chapters. Then, in Chap. 6, Kathleen Bachynski gives an
account of the debate over the use of helmets in the late 1960s. Moving into
the twenty-first century, for Chap. 7 Lucia Trimbur looks at the contentious
matter of concussion research and the suppression of evidence. And, in Chap.
8, Peter Benson, José Figueroa-López, Richard Kuehn, Andrew Whitaker,
 Sport, Politics, and Harm: Introduction xxv

and Adam Rugg argue that injury in the NFL cannot be properly discussed
without reference to the racial dimension and the looting of black bodies.
The Part III, titled ‘Sporting Females, Sexuality, and the Politics of Injury’,
again has four chapters. Chapter 9, by Carol A. Osborne, is about the politics
of injury and death in mountaineering, particularly as they affect female
climbers, and takes as its focus the much-discussed death of British climber
Alison Hargreaves on K2, the world’s second highest mountain, in 1995. In
Chap. 10 Kath Woodward looks at boxing, a sport now with many female as
well as male practitioners, and discusses gendered attitudes to both boxing
bodies and boxing injuries. Chapter 11, by Karen Corteen, is about the dam-
aging bodily experiences of women employed to compete in World Wrestling
Entertainment (WWE) in the United States. Chapter 12 is by Ruby
Finklestein and is a partly autobiographical recollection by an ex-boxing cor-
respondent of a career covering this frequently brutal trade. It includes a
reflection on the savage title fight in 1962 between Bernado ‘Benny the Kid’
Paret and Emile Griffith, after which Paret died of his injuries. Paret had pre-
viously taunted Griffith, a bisexual, for his sexuality.
The title of Part IV, ‘Sport as Transport: Horse, Cycle, and Motor Racing
and the Politics of Safety’, is self-explanatory. Patrick Sharman, in Chap. 13,
writes about the changing politics of safety in horseracing. In Chap. 14, Peter
Bramham analyses the culture of cycling and its relationship to injury, rang-
ing from the (virtually routine) risk of sustained damage to feet, knees, lower
backs, hands, and wrists as well as death and accidents from road potholes and
slippery surfaces or collisions with other road users to the perils of doping
which characterise the corporate, hyper-masculine world of professional road
racers. Chapter 15 charts the history of, and debates over, the politics of driver
and spectator safety in Formula One motor racing and is written by
Stephen Wagg.
This brings us to Part V, ‘Sport, Injury, and the Culture of Late Capitalism’.
Debates about safety in sports inevitably raise, as they have always raised,
questions about the dominant culture and ways of being in the societies where
those sports are played. Much of these debates, equally inevitably, have
revolved around the relationship of modern sport to the rise and global pre-
dominance of capitalism—the broad theme here.
Chapter 16, by David Andrews and Ryan King-White, discusses the
rationalisation process to which the sporting body is now routinely subject
and argues that it is, in fact, inherently irrational. It uses the circumstances
surrounding the death of US college athlete Jordan McNair as a case study.
Chapter 17 maintains the theme of sporting bodies—in this case, bodies of
the deceased—as Sean Brayton and Michelle T. Helstein take a different
xxvi Sport, Politics, and Harm: Introduction

look at the ‘concussion crisis’ and trend for North American sportspeople to
donate their brains to researchers investigating brain injuries and Chronic
Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). They relate this specifically to issues of
social class in the history of organ procurement. Chapter 18 returns to the
theme of race: using case studies. Scott Brooks, Stacey Flores, and Anthony
J. Weems argue that the punishing schedules to which young US basketball
players are subject are invariably the lot of young black males from the inner
city. Chapter 19, by Stephen Wagg, is about baseball and the controversy sur-
rounding the widely practised ‘Tommy John surgery’ and its implication for
medical ethics, baseball economics, and the politics of childhood. Chapter 20,
by Shaun Edmonds, is an analysis of the burgeoning phenomenon of
CrossFit, a hybrid of sport and exercise that carries a high risk of injury and
which has drawn criticism from fitness organisations in the United States. The
following Chap. 21 examines Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), another high-risk
sport activity that has been the subject of public condemnation—the late US
Senator John McCain called it ‘human cockfighting’. Here Alex Channon,
Christopher R. Matthews, and Mathew Hillier discuss the medical provi-
sion deemed necessary to protect the reputation of this violent combat sport.
Violent sports have been the subject of a number of popular dystopian
films—Rollerball (1975, with a re-make in 2002) and Death Race (2008)
spring to mind. In Chap. 22 Nicholas Rickards analyses The Hunger Games
trilogy, probably the most influential of these.
Part VI, titled ‘Sport and Injury: Case Studies’, is composed of a series par-
ticularly notable sport injuries and attendant controversies. In Chap. 23, lead-
ing scholarly critic of the Olympic industry Helen Jefferson Lenskyj and Lee
Hill chart the changing attitudes to injury in the Olympic movement, from
the late nineteenth century to the late 1980s. They look particularly at doping
(discussed earlier in the case of Petra Schneider) and historic arguments over
the purported dangers to the reproductive capacities of female athletes.
Chapter 24, by John Sugden and Peter Watt, is a discussion of the selection
of Brazilian footballer Ronaldo to play in the FIFA World Cup Final of
1998 in Paris. Ronaldo, the team’s star player, was reputed to be unwell and
his name was not, initially, on the team sheet. His late addition to the team
was strongly rumoured at the time to have been the result of an intervention
by the team’s sponsors, the global sports apparel corporation Nike.
David Rowe, in Chap. 25, focuses on the tragic death of Australian crick-
eter Phillip Hughes, killed by a bouncer in a Sheffield Shield match in 2014.
Amid much public grieving, Hughes’ family struggled to establish that he had
been in an ‘unsafe workplace’, rather than being the victim of a ‘tragic’ or
‘freakish’ accident.
 Sport, Politics, and Harm: Introduction xxvii

In Chap. 26, Nicole Eugene looks at narratives on boxing icon Muhammad

Ali as a carrier of Parkinson’s disease. She suggests popular commentary on
Ali, and the assumption that his Parkinson’s was the result of a boxing injury,
served to promote misleading impressions of the lived experience of
Parkinson’s.
The Israel/Palestine conflict, one of the most contentious, longest-running,
and divisive in the modern era, is the context for Chap. 27, by Jon Dart who
looks at the claim that the Israeli military, the IDF (Israeli Defence Force), has
an unwritten policy of deliberately inflicting injury on Palestinian footballers.
Part 7, the final part of the book, is titled ‘Sport, Harm, and the Politics of
Wellbeing’. In many countries, certainly in the Western world, the responsi-
bilities of the state now encompass not only the defence of the realm and the
maintenance of law and order, but the wellbeing of its young people. This
closing section comprises three chapters which discuss threats to the wellbeing
of the young in the world of sport and efforts to combat those threats. In
Chap. 28 Joanne McVeigh and Melanie Lang look at UK sport policy in the
twenty-first century and assess the politics of safeguarding and protecting
children in sport in England.
Chapter 29 is about sport and mental trauma. Michael Atkinson and
Kristina Smith use ethnographic data collected on youth athletes in ice-­
hockey and soccer in Canada to examine how particular sport cultures can be
dangerous on developmental grounds for young boys.
Finally, in Chap. 30, Graham Kirkwood and Allyson Pollock outline and
discuss their experiences in conducting, and dealing with opposition to, their
aforementioned campaign to mitigate the rising injury count in British
schools’ rugby.
Many thanks to Peter Bramham, Jon Dart, and Karen Corteen for their
help in the composition of this introduction.

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 Part I
Bodily Damage and Pre- and Early
Industrial Sport
 The Perils of Rewarding Toughness: Honor,
Injury, and Death in the Athletics
of the Ancient World
Michael Poliakoff

“A boxer’s victory is gained in blood,” so runs the first century BCE1 victory
inscription of a young man from Thera.2 The sentiment is hardly unique. It
finds a close parallel in an account found in Aelian concerning Eurydamas of
Cyrene: on his way to an Olympic victory, he swallowed blood and broken
teeth, lest his opponent know what an effective blow he had landed.3 Both the
stories, however, are relatively innocuous compared to the epitaph found at
Olympia honoring a boxer from ancient Alexandria:

Agathos Daimon, nicknamed “the Camel,”

A boxer from Alexandria
a victor at Nemea.
Boxing here in the stadium,
he died, having prayed to
Zeus for victory or
death. Age 35.
Farewell.4
1
Before the Common Era or Before the Current Era.
2
Georg Kaibel, Epigrammata graeca ex lapidibus conlecta (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1878) 942; Luigi Moretti,
Inscrizioni agonistiche greche (Rome, 1953), no. 55.
3
Aelian, Varia Historia 10, 19.
4
G.-J.M.-G. Te Riele, Bulletin de Correspondence Hellenique 88 (1964): 186–187; see further Louis
Robert, Bulletin épigraphique in Revue des études grecques (1965), no. 182.

M. Poliakoff (*)
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
e-mail: MPoliakoff@goacta.org

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 3

S. Wagg, A. M. Pollock (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Sport, Politics and Harm,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72826-7_1
4 M. Poliakoff

Literary sources confirm the remarkable willingness of competitors to

risk life-threatening injury, and, at least in some quarters, the high status
that incurring such risks brought. The poet Pindar wrote of athletes,
“Prowess without risk brings no honor” (Olympian Odes 6, 9–11). What
this could mean is vividly shown in the story of the death of Arrichion,
Olympic victor in 564 BCE and twice before that in the pankration (a sport
in which competitors combined boxing, wrestling, kicking, and strangle
holds). Philostratus’ description of a painting of Arrichion is many centu-
ries after the fact and heavily romanticized5 but nevertheless a window into
an athletic value system in which the athlete’s honor counted far more than
his safety.

You come to the Olympic festival itself and to the finest event in Olympia, for right
here is the men’s pankration. Arrichion, who has died seeking victory, is taking the
crown for it, and this Olympic judge is crowning him. … Let’s look at Arrichion’s
deed before it comes to an end, for he seems to have conquered not his opponent
alone, but the whole Greek nation. … They shout and jump out of their seats and
wave their hands and garments. Some spring into the air, others in ecstasy wrestle
with the man nearby. …Though it is indeed a great thing that he already won twice
at Olympia, what has just now happened is greater: he has won at the cost of his life
and goes to the land of the Blessed with the very dust of the struggle. Don’t think this
was the result of chance! There were very clever advance plans for this victory. … The
one strangling Arrichion is depicted as a corpse, and he signals concession with his
hand, but Arrichion is depicted as all victors are—indeed his blush is blooming and
his sweat is still fresh, and he smiles, as do the living, when they perceive their victory.
(Philostratus, Imagines 2.6)

Even the aristocratic Tiberius Claudius Rufus of Smyrna, as an inscription

honoring his performance read, “considered it better to scorn life than give up
the hope of the crown.”6 He had battled his way through multiple rounds at
Olympia before encountering an opponent in the finals who had had the
advantage of drawing a bye and coming into the finals undoubtedly better
rested and hydrated.

5
Concerning Philostratus’ romanticization of the past, see Ewen L. Bowie. “Greeks and Their Past in the
Second Sophistic,” in ed. M.I. Finley, Studies in Ancient Society (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1974).
6
Wilhelm Dittenberger and K. Purgold, Die Inschriften von Olympia. Die Ergebnisse der von dem Deutschen
Reichveranstalteten Ausgrabung 5 (Berlin 1896), no. 54/55. See further Reinhold Merkelbach, Zeitschrift
für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 15 (1974): 99–104.
 The Perils of Rewarding Toughness: Honor, Injury, and Death… 5

This essay will examine death and injury in athletic events, where such
occurrences are in principle unexpected contingencies, in contrast to Roman
gladiatorial combat or European duels, where the effect of swords or guns can
be anticipated.7 What is at issue is a question of degree: knowing the likeli-
hood of bodily harm, what boundaries and limitations exist within the activi-
ties to mitigate (or not) the danger. Most of the discussion will be devoted to
Greece, which provides a much richer body of evidence and whose athletic
practices substantially informed Roman sports.
A certain resignation to the inevitability of athletic catastrophe appears in
Athenian law. In a court speech, the fourth century BCE orator Demosthenes
cites the law: “If a person kills another unintentionally in an athletic con-
test … he shall not flee into exile as a manslayer on account of this” (23.53).
In the Laws, Plato similarly prescribes, “If anyone unintentionally causes the
death of a friend in athletic contest in public festivals, either on the spot or
even later as a result of the blows … let him be free of (blood) pollution”
(Laws 865 a).
A general willingness to accept the probability of serious athletic injuries
coupled with an inherently injurious sport like pankration or boxing would
almost of necessity jeopardize life and limb. There was no point system to
determine victory. Pankration and boxing matches ended when one opponent
was unable or unwilling to continue. There was, of course, a cultural impera-
tive to continue, as is evident in the details of how Arrichion the pankratiast
died—or, at least, how later centuries understood the event:

Having already grabbed Arrichion around the waist, the opponent had in mind
killing him and rammed an arm against his throat, cutting off his breath, while
with his legs fastened around Arrichion’s groin, he pressed his feet against the back of
both of his knees. He got ahead of Arrichion with this stranglehold, since the sleep of
death was from that point creeping over his senses, but in relaxing his grip, he did
not get past Arrichion’s stratagem. For Arrichion kicked away his heel, which put his
opponent’s right side into an unfavorable position, since now the knee was dangling.
Then Arrichion held his opponent-who was no longer really an opponent-to his groin
and leaning to his left, he trapped the tip of his opponent’s (right) foot in the bend of
his (right)knee and pulled the ankle out of joint with the violence of his twist in the
other direction.
(Philostratus, Imagines 2.6)

7
Note, however, the use of wooden swords or blunted weapons in some gladiatorial events, bringing these
events into the realm of contests focused on skill. See Michael Carter, “Gladiatorial Combat With ‘Sharp’
Weapons,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 155 (2006): 161–175.
6 M. Poliakoff

It appears that Arrichion’s opponent, whose name is unknown, as the sec-

ond place at Olympia was not recorded, had rammed his forearm against
Arrichion’s throat with sufficient force to induce a laryngospasm, possibly
with a fracture in addition. That tactic appeared to be legal, and the Olympic
judges did not interfere as the strangulation proceeded. It was Arrichion’s
dying stratagem to dislocate his opponent’s ankle, causing him to concede
victory, unaware that Arrichion, lying face down in the sand, had
suffocated.
Even now, at a time when mixed martial arts and full contact Karate have
gained rather wide popularity, the Hellenic acceptance of a very high likeli-
hood of severe injury in sport will seem to us a startling challenge to roman-
ticized notions of order, grace, and harmony in Greek civilization. Less
surprising, perhaps, given the Roman fascination with gladiatorial combat, is
the Roman weaponization of boxing gloves, virtually ensuring an injurious, if
not lethal, outcome. The task for the ancient historian, the sociologist, and
the anthropologist is to describe the behavior as accurately as the evidence
allows and to understand the context of the behavior and the role it played in
the ancient world. The ethical quandary of knowing what level of risk is rea-
sonable and when it eclipses the benefits of the courage, perseverance, and
endurance that sport can encourage was manifest in antiquity, and, self-­
evidently, is always before us as well.
Especially in the combat sports, some risk of the injury is unavoidable.
Indeed, one of the very earliest descriptions of a wrestling match, that of Jacob
and a mysterious stranger (the Hebrew is clear in calling the protagonist
“iysh,” which means “man,” rather than “malach,” or “angel”) the patriarch to
be does not emerge unscathed, but leaves with an injury to the socket of his
hip. The evidence that we have for sport in ancient Egypt and the Near East
is largely visual, but it is a reasonable inference from the Beni Hasan tomb
paintings of wrestlers (especially the scenes of choke holds), and the temple
carvings in Medinet Habu, Meir, and El Amarna showing stick fighting, that
significant injury was likely.8 The Greek combat sports of boxing, wrestling,
and pankration virtually guaranteed a relatively high level of predictable
injury. But even given the very nature of these sports, what we know of the
rules, equipment, and facilities for the athletic competitions of ancient Greece
shows that the safety of those who participated was of remarkably little con-
cern. Even relatively easy and accessible measures to limit injury were
left unused.

8
See Michael Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World. Competition, Violence, and Culture (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) figures 8, 10, 11, 24.
 The Perils of Rewarding Toughness: Honor, Injury, and Death… 7

It is illuminating in this context to compare contemporary regulations for

amateur boxing with the practices of the ancient world. In the USA Boxing
Technical Rules, the first listed duty of the referee is “To care for both Boxers
and to make safety [of ] both Boxers a primary concern throughout the Bout.”
A further listed duty is “To prevent a weak Boxer from receiving undue and
unnecessary punishment.” Furthermore, the first of the listed responsibilities
of the referee is “To terminate a contest at any stage if this Referee considers
it to be one-sided.” 9
Turning now to equestrian, rather than combat sport, we see an avail-
able safety measure unused. In chariot racing, the Greek hippodrome,
unlike the Roman circus, had no central barrier, which would effectively
have reduced the possibility of head-on collisions. Pindar noted that at
the Pythian games there were forty chariot wrecks (Pythian 5, 49–53).
The sport is inherently hazardous, with the ever-present danger to the
driver of being thrown from the chariot and entangled in the reins:
Roman chariot drivers routinely carried a knife with which to cut them-
selves loose from the otherwise inevitable fate if thrown of being dragged
to death by the horses. The tragedian Sophocles’ evocation of this even-
tuality was no poetic flight of fancy:

Orestes always drove tight at the corners

barely grazing the edge of the post with his wheel,
loosing his hold of the trace horse on his right
while he checked the near horse. In his other laps
the poor young man and his horses had come through safe.
but this time he let go of the left rein
as the horse was turning. Unaware, he struck the edge
of the pillar and broke his axle in the center.
He was himself thrown from the rails of the chariot
and tangled in the reins. As he fell, the horses
bolted wildly to the middle of the course.
When the crowd saw him fallen from his car,
they shuddered. “How young he was,” “How gallant his deeds,”
and “How sadly he has ended,” as they saw him
thrown earthward now, and then, tossing his legs
to the sky-until at last the grooms
with difficulty stopped the runaway team
and freed him, but so covered with blood that no one
of his friends could recognize the unhappy corpse.
(Electra, 741–756, tr. David Grene)

9
USA Boxing, Official Rule Book. Technical Rules (March 2016), 18–20. https://www.teamusa.org/usa-
boxing/rulebook/~/media/9C11D7FE103D47E38C144B881B301335.ashx.
8 M. Poliakoff

Given the remarkable technology the Greeks employed to ensure a fair start
for the horses, the absence of a simple barrier is a dramatic contrast. (There
was also a similarly sophisticated device called the hysplex that regulated the
start of foot races.) Typically, the owner of the horses and chariot, who would
receive the victor’s crown, was not the driver, but even so, the unwillingness
to take basic precautions is remarkable.
The modern trajectory for athletic rules tends to favor more regulation
and more attention to the safety of the competitors. There is clear evi-
dence of movement in the rules away from certain basic safety measures.
An inscription from Olympia, dating to the late sixth century BCE, for-
bids wrestlers from breaking the fingers of their opponents.10 Although
such a tactic seems contrary to the skills typically tested in a wrestling
contest—balance, timing, leverage, strength, endurance, and the like, and
notwithstanding the attempt to ban this disagreeable tactic, finger break-
ing gained Leontiskos two Olympic crowns, one in 456 and a second in
452 BCE. Clearly, the ban on finger breaking—apparently a ban that did
not last for very long—did not comport with the Hellenic expectations
for high-level wrestling competition, and in pankration, where locking
and breaking a joint would be legal, Sostratos of Sikyon won three Olympic
crowns relying on this tactic, as well as many other victories at Delphi,
Nemea, and Corinth.11
Tolerance for serious injury is yet more evident in the history of Greek and
Roman boxing equipment. The earliest boxing thongs were light strips of
oxhide, which served to protect the boxer’s knuckles from injury, but, of
course, provided no protection for the opponent’s face, while encouraging the
boxers to punch more aggressively.

10
Joachim Ebert and Peter Siewert, “Eine archaische Bronzeurkunde aus Olympia mit Vorschriften für
Ringkämpfer und Kampfrichter,” in 11. Bericht über die Ausgrabung in Olympia, (Berlin and New York:
De Gruyter, 1999), 391–412; Peter Siewert and Hans Taeuber, Neue Inschriften von Olympia.
TYCHE. Beiträge zur Alten Geschichte, Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Sonderband 7 (Wien: Holzhausen,
2013), 27–29.
11
Poliakoff (above, note 8), 28–30; 57.
 The Perils of Rewarding Toughness: Honor, Injury, and Death… 9

Vase painting of boxers, c. 550–540 BCE. The boxers wear light thongs on their fists.
Note that the right thumb projects beyond the fist, creating an additional hazard for
the opponent’s eyes, and the boxer on the viewer’s left bleeds profusely from his
nose. British Museum B295. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

In other words, the thongs tended to make the likelihood of brain concus-
sion greater than would have been the case for even a bare-knuckle fight. In
the fourth century BCE, heavier equipment, called the “sharp thongs” replaced
these light coverings. Sharp thongs featured a thick pad of leather, approxi-
mately an inch high, that formed a large and lacerative edge over the knuckles.
Greek sources describe the pad as hard or dry. The extensive wrapping over
the entire lower arm served to protect the arm from fracture, which, given the
weight of the thongs, would be important to ensure that boxing matches
would not end prematurely.
10 M. Poliakoff

Bronze statue from the first century BCE. Museo Nazionale Romano delle Terme 1055.
The boxer wears the “sharp thongs” and his face and ears show signs of trauma

In neither of these styles of thongs is the thumb bound to the other

fingers, and there is visual evidence of boxers with their thumbs extended.
The danger to the eyes is self-evident, and two Greek authors take note of
boxers or pankratiasts who have lost an eye to the sport.12 Interestingly,
the past four decades have seen movement toward thumbless or at least
tied-thumb gloves to reduce the danger of such injuries: this was appar-
ently not of interest in antiquity.
A series of Greek epigrams gives a gallows humor to the sharp thongs.
Lucillius, a first century CE epigrammatist, wrote:

A sieve, Apollophanes, is what you’ve got for a head,

much like what moths leave on a book’s edge.

12
Libanius 64.119; Galen, Protrepticus 12 (1.31 K., 124–5 M.)
 The Perils of Rewarding Toughness: Honor, Injury, and Death… 11

Surely we see the drillings of the ant (myrmex—a popular term for the thongs),
and some tracks go straight, some at a slant…
Come on and box, have no fear—
for if you get gouged some more up there,
What you’ll get is what’s been before—
Now with so many scars, you can’t get more. (AP 11.78)

In another epigram he jests that after four hours, the boxer Stratophon was
unrecognizable to his city, and even to himself, when he looked in a mirror.
Another of his epigrams (11.75) describes how a boxer returning home can-
not claim his inheritance, since he is no longer recognizable. The sarcastic
humor is cruel, but, given all that is known about Greek boxing, it retains a
grim verisimilitude.
Wrestlers and boxers are prone to disfigurement of the outer ear, and
Greek authors take note of this. Visual art sometimes shows ear protec-
tive headgear, though not frequently, and there is no evidence of its
appearance in competition. For practice, boxers often wore sphairai,
which appear to have been much like modern boxing gloves. Plato
observed that boxers in training would “come as close as possible to the
real thing, and instead of thongs, put on sphairai so that they could prac-
tice blows and avoiding blows as much as possible.” Plutarch’s later use of
the term epispharai makes it clear that the purpose of such gloves was to
make the blows relatively harmless.13
What is truly remarkable about the very existence of padded gloves in the
ancient world is that the Greeks never used them for competition. Clearly, the
cultural imperative was to have a contest that would reward courage and pain
tolerance in addition to athletic skill, and the severe injuries of which we read
were inevitable.
The Romans, used to seeing public executions in the arena, as well as gladi-
atorial combat, not surprisingly wanted to see boxing contests with hand cov-
erings even more lacerative than the sharp thongs. The dangerous weaponry
that was part of the Roman caestus is evident in both literary descriptions and
in Roman art.

13
Plutarch, Praecepta rei publicae gerendae 32 (Moralia 825e).
12 M. Poliakoff

Roman boxing caestus. A cord ties the projecting metal plate onto the boxer’s fore-
arm. First/second century CE. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2001.219

The Roman epic poet Virgil’s description does not seem exaggerated in its
focus on lethality: “Entellus hurled into their midst the twin caestus of vast
weight in which fierce Eryx was accustomed to raise his fists in combat, bind-
ing his forearms with the stiff leather. Their minds were stunned: the gloves
made from seven enormous ox hides were stiff with the lead and iron sewn
into them. … Entellus said: ‘These weapons once your brother bore, and you
can see they are tainted still with blood and spattered brains’ ” (Aeneid, 5,
401–413).
The structure of athletic competitions made injury and medical problems
more likely. Sunstroke, heat exhaustion, and dehydration are ever-present
dangers at outdoor competitions in warm climates. This may underlie the
second century CE physician Galen’s surprising claim that there have been
many deaths from ruptured blood vessels in sprinting.14 The Roman states-
man Cicero commented that inexperienced boxers could bear their
opponents’ blows more easily than they could the sun (Brutus 69). Yet in the
14
Galen, On the Small Ball 5 (5.909–10 K).
 The Perils of Rewarding Toughness: Honor, Injury, and Death… 13

combat sports, matches continued without break until one competitor

emerged as the victor. And there was no standard rest period between bouts.
It was a decided disadvantage to be paired with an ephedros, a competitor who
had had the good fortune to have drawn a bye in a previous round. Since there
were no weight classes, the mismatching of lighter-framed athletes with those
of greater size, weight, and muscle power was an inevitable danger for the
smaller man.
Injuries in modern times occur even on the best competition surfaces.
Greek wrestlers and pankratiasts competed on a softened sand surface called
the skamma, which regularly needed to be refreshed and re-softened with a
pickaxe, as is occasionally seen in Greek vase paintings. The Hippocratic cor-
pus of medical writings (Epidemics, 5.14 [5.212 L]) recounts the death of a
wrestler ten days after he fell on a hard surface, with his opponent landing on
top of him. It is unclear whether the skamma had been insufficiently softened
or if the wrestlers fell outside the skamma. The medical text describes the
progress of the apparent injury to the throat and chest as it progressed over a
ten-day period to its fatal outcome.
Aristotle observes that few who won in the boy’s category at Olympia
returned later to win in the men’s division (Politics 8.4 [= 1339a1–4]). We can
see today the overtraining of young athletes and their subsequent skeletal and
health problems: it is possible that elite training in antiquity, notorious for its
intensity, had similar effects. Galen wrote so polemically about ancient athlet-
ics that he cannot be viewed as an impartial witness,15 but there is likely to be
considerable truth in his observation that “athletes each day labor at their
exercises beyond what is suitable, and they take their food under force, often
extending their eating until midnight” (Protrepticus 11). His disapproval of
eating habits must be a reference to those athletes whose performance benefits
from bulk, notably boxers, wrestlers, and pankratiasts, but one should also
consider the damage of repetitive hurling of a discus or javelin, or, for young
athletes, the potential damage to growing joints of ill-designed and excessive
running exercises.
It remains for the historian to seek explanation for practices that deliber-
ately avoided highly accessible safety measures. The Greek word kartereia,
“toughness,” surfaces frequently in descriptions of athletes, especially on their
victory monuments. That still leaves, however, the question of why the rules
and structure of athletic competition promoted toughness, even to the extent
that the conditions for competition would, of necessity, interfere with the

15
On Galen’s bias, see Poliakoff (above, note 8), 93–94.
14 M. Poliakoff

performance of the exhausted athletes. Part of the answer comes from the
realm of Greek warfare.
By the sixth century, Greek land battles were fought with soldiers
arranged in phalanx formation, with its highly organized ranks and files.
The bronze armor and weaponry weighed between fifty and seventy
pounds. These hoplites, as they were called, would march to battle in the
full sunlight and heat and advance upon the enemy at a trot. Simply mov-
ing into the battle line was an exercise in endurance, and an exercise in
courage, given that facing the advancing phalanx was a row of enemy
spearpoints coming to meet them. An experienced soldier would know,
too, that wounds tended to fall on the neck and groin, two places that the
large bronze shield did not cover.16
In this context, the harsh conditions of Greek athletic competition
became more comprehensible. Male citizens needed to be physically and
mentally prepared for warfare, but with the exception of Sparta, the
Greek city-states did not keep their infantrymen under constant military
training. Accordingly, just as in battle there was no opportunity for rest
or rehydration, so at the athletic festivals, there were no time limits for
the bouts and no rest periods between rounds in the tournament. In
battle the opposing warriors could be of any size, just as there were no
weight classes in Greek competitions that would give smaller athletes a
better chance for success.
And, at a yet deeper level, athletic competition gave the ambitious Greek
male an opportunity for individual success and recognition that was no
longer available in military life. The success of the hoplite army depended
on strictly maintaining the integrity of the battle line, for if the line of
overlapping shields were broken, then the soldiers became open to attack
from the side and were in grave peril. Hence, the old style of warfare,
enshrined in Homer, of outstanding individuals winning fame and glory
on the battlefield in one-­on-­one combat, was gone. The maverick was as
dangerous as the coward. Greek city-states thus came to view their wartime
victories as the achievements of the entire people, not of a heroic general,
however brilliant or valorous he might have been. When the great general
Miltiades, who led Athens to the crucial victory over Persia in 490 BCE
asked for his name to be included in the great mural of the battle, the

On hoplite armor and tactics, see Victor Davis Hanson, Wars of the Ancient Greeks (Washington, D.C.:
16

Smithsonian Books, 2004), 44–65.

 The Perils of Rewarding Toughness: Honor, Injury, and Death… 15

Athenians refused, saying that the city had won the battle, not the gener-
al.17 An athletic victor, however, was assured of a monument, often a statue
with an inscription, erected at public expense. Athletic competition was an
area, unlike military and political affairs, where self-assertion, self-aggran-
dizement, and glory were safe.
Only in sport could the Greek man prove his mettle in fighting one-on-­
one. Indeed, nowhere else in Greek civic life was personal aggression tolerated
and encouraged. We know from surviving court speeches that the Athenians
severely punished even casual acts of assault and battery with sanctions includ-
ing the death penalty.18 It is not difficult to see how the Greek combat sports,
which did indeed flirt with reckless endangerment of life and limb, repre-
sented an outlet for the aggression and ambition that would have devastating
consequences in other times and places. (In the case of dueling with lethal
weapons over slights to personal honor, those consequences were writ large in
Europe through the late nineteenth century.)19 Athletic competitions of
ancient Greece channeled through the rough contests of the combat sports,
made the Greek pursuit of honor far less destructive than the European duel
and relatively safe for the cohesion of society. The great athletic festivals, then,
were a surrogate for the world of heroic combat that had vanished from Greek
reality. The cultural burden of the Homeric poems, which functioned like a
bible for the ancient Greeks in guiding values and conduct, could find an
outlet in sport.
To win in competition was to achieve heroic fame. In many cases, we have
to this day the names and deeds of athletes preserved in stone inscriptions and
in literature. Pindar wrote, “The victor for the remainder of his days has a
sweetness free of the tempest blast ” (Olympian Odes 1, 97–99). But at
what cost?
The modern world will rightly depart—and depart sharply—from the
more egregious disregard for the safety of competitors found in ancient Greece
and Rome. What level of risk and trauma is acceptable in a civilized society?
What is productive for civic life and what is destructive? We are all likely to
draw inspiration from the brilliance and courage of an athlete like Lindsey
Vonn: her storied career includes multiple instances, including winning a gold
medal and two bronze medals in the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, when she

17
See Aeschines, Against Ktesiphon, 183–186, and further, M. Detienne, in ed. J.-P Vernant, Problèmes de
la guerre en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1968), 127–128.
18
Demosthenes, Against Meidias 21, 45.
19
See V. G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History. Honour and the Reign of the Aristocracy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988) and Kevin McAleer, Dueling. The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siecle Germany
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Vielä näillä valtioilla,
Että kesti keskustelut
Eikä päästy päätöksihin,
Kun oli aikoa kulunna
Vielä viisi kuukauttakin.
Vaan on vielä tietämätön,
Asiakin arvelussa,
Tokko päätökset pitääpi
Eli ei merkinne mitänä
Valtiopäiväpäätöksemme;
Jos ei perustus pitäne,
Suomen laki suojanamme.
Tääll' oli myöskin tutkittava
Manivesti mainittava
Heleässä helmikuussa;
Joka tuotti tutkintoa,
Aivan paljon arvelua,
Se on paljon seisottanna
Yhteistä asian tointa.
Kaikistapa kansa saapi
Seuraukset selvitellä.
Mitä kansa saa kokea —
Ettei tiedä tuulen päällä
Mitä sattuupi selällä.

NUORISOLLEN NEUVOKSI VÄLTTÄMÄHÄN VÄKIJUOMAT.

(Raittiusjuhlassa.)
 Soisin Suomeni hyväksi,
Kaiken kansan raittihiksi,
Että kuuluis kaikin paikoin
Hyvä maine Suomenmaasta.
Ettei kuuluis kaikkialta
Kamaloita kertomia,
Saapi nähdä sanomissa
Miesimurhia monia
Siellä täällä tapahtunut
Suloisessa Suomessamme.
Tätä kaikkee katsellessa
Vesi silmähän vetääpi,
Kuin on kurjoa elämä,
Pahuutta jälellä paljon
Kaikin paikoin kansassamme.
Se on maallemme häpeä,
Rannoillemme raskas kuorma,
Että on elämä vioissa,
Rikoksissa riettahissa.
Mistä paisuupi pahennus,
Mistä syyt on saatavissa,
Kuss' on kurja turman lähde?
Se on vaka vanha herra,
Viina se vihattu vieras,
Kaikkein kauhujen tekijä,
Luojan töitten turmelija.
Vaikk' on tuomarin tuvassa
Monet sakot suorittanna,
Viel' on pantu putkahankin,
Vesileivällen vedetty,
Vaan ei tunne turmatöitään
Eikä pahojaan paranna.
Vaan ei tuollen turmiollen
Vie oo sulkua suvaittu
Lain kautta laitettua,
Tehty lukkoa lujoa,
Ettei pääsis pöydän päähän
Isäntänä istumahan.
Sit' oon ihmennyt ikäni,
Ajan kaiken kummastellut,
Kun niin kauan kansakunnat,
Esivallat voimalliset
Suosiipi sitä sukua,
Lipiätä myrkkylientä;
Ettei jo ajalla ennen
Maasta temmattu tulinen,
Viety pois vihainen konna
Kansan kaiken saatavista,
Kuin se turmeli tuhannet,
Sadat surman suuhun saattoi.
Suotta Suomen kaikki kunnat
Edusmiehensä evästit,
Valtioillen valmistelit
Sillä lauseella lujalla,
Että alkohooli herra,
Kansan kaiken turmelija
Äkin poies poljettaisiin
Aivan apteekin alallen,
Tipparohdoks' rohtoloihin.
Ei kaikunut kansan ääni,
Vaikuttanut valtioissa,
Suomen herroissa hyvissä,
Meidän arvo aatelissa,
Pohatoissa, porvareissa,
Jotka aivan ankarasti
Puolusti pahatekoa,
Väkijuomain valmistusta.
Niinpä lausunkin lujasti,
Sanon kansan kuultavaksi,
Suomen säädyillen sanelen:
Jos teill' ompi onni suotu
Vielä päästä valtioillen,
Isoisillen istuimillen,
Tehkää tuosta turmiosta,
Väkijuomain väijynnästä
Loppu kerran kaikkenansa,
Loppu liemestä häjystä,
Tuhansien turmiosta;
Se on kansalle kirous,
Vihanmalja tälle maalle,
Tuskan tuoja ja häpeän,
Koston kerran Korkealta.
ENTISISTÄ JA NYKYISISTÄ AJOISTA
(1907).

Ruvennenko runoilullen
Tämän ajan asioista; —
Kuinka ajan kunkin kulku
Menojansa muutteleepi.
Samoin kaikki kansan toimet
Tapojansa toimittaapi
Aina kullakin ajalla;
Kuin on täällä kulkeminen,
Milloin myötä-, milloin vasta-
Tuulta täällä soudettava
Tämän maaliman merellä,
Ihmisillä ilman alla.
Kuitenkin on kulkijoilla,
Nykyajan asujoilla
Monenmoista muuttelua;
Joita nyt nykyinen aika
Tuopi etehen enemmän
Kaiken kansan keskentehen.
Kun on vielä vaaliajat,
Valtiollen valmistukset,
Edusmiesten evästykset.
Näistä ompi nähtävänä,
Näistä toimista tulokset,
Kuinka ompi Suomen kansa
Eri seuroiksi erinnä,
Pukeutunna puolueisiin,
Joita on jollain nimillä.
Siitäpä tulevi sitten,
Ett on kansasta kadonnut,
Sopu kaikki sortununna,
Veljeys manallen mennyt,
Mielet monimielisiksi;
Joista syntyy sanasota,
Kiistelyjä kiivahia.
Vaan mikä puolueista parahin
Ompi maata moittimassa,
Vielä vanhoja tapoja,
Se on suuret sosialistit,
Mokraatit monilukuiset;
Jotka kautta kokousten
Juttujansa jutteleepi;
Akitaattorien avulla.
Vaan on näissä joutavia
Monen puolueen puheissa.
Nää on aina alkusyynä
Että seuroja enemmän,
Puolueita kaikin paikoin.
Ompi sitten syntymässä.
Eri seuroiksi elämä
Turmiollen turmeltuupi;
Josta näky nähtävänä,
Edessämme esimerkit,
Miten on mielet muuttunehet,
Sopu kaikki sortununna
Kansan kaikissa tiloissa.
Paha on nähä näkevän,
Paha kuulla kuulevankin.
Toista oli aika ennen,
Viime vuosikymmeniset.
Eipä silloin elämässä
Ollut paljon puolueita;
Oli kaksi kaikestansa:
Olihan omat suomalaiset,
Vaarit vanhat ruotsalaiset.
Nyt on uudet urohomme
Ottanehet ohjelmaansa
Kutsut kuudella nimellä.

RAUTATIE-KOKOUKSESSA PIEKSÄMÄELLÄ 6 p. heinäk. 1898.

Kuin ma satuin saapuvillen,

Koska kokousta pitivät
Tehtävistä rautateistä,
Mikä paikka ois parahin
Poikkiradaks' Pohjanmaallen.
Oli myöskin oivanlailla
Tänne tullut ukkosia
Seurakunnast' seitsemästä.
Mitäs äijät äykäsivät,
Kun oli linjasta kysymys?
Mistä halus Haukivuori,
Vaatimus oli Virtasalmen,
Mistä paras Pieksämäen,
Haluaisi Hankasalmi,
Jutteleepi jäppiläiset.
Kysyttyä komitean,
Mikä paikka ois' parahin,
Kaikki vaarit vastajaapi:
»Kodin kautta kulku suorin,
Kynnys väärä on kylähän.»
Mik' oli tieto tilastoista,
Viemisistä muillen maillen,
Koottuna komiteallen?
Suuret summat Pieksämäki,
Harkinnut ol' Hankasalmi
Tuotavaksi tukkisummat
Lähes miljooniin menevät.
Entäs sitten sarvipäitä,
Tuhansia teurahia,
Vielä voita varsin paljon,
Jonka katsoi komitea
Liioitelluksi luvuksi
Yhden vuoden vaihtuessa.
Tämän tunsi tuhmempikin
Ettei ole ensinkänä
Tässä kohtuutta katsottu
Laskuja nyt laitettaissa.
 Vielä paljonkin puhuivat,
Kovin paljon kiistelivät
Paikkakuntansa paraaksi
Keski-Suomen kuuluvissa,
Jok' ei tienne tarkemmasti,
Erittäinkin etäisimmät.
Luulis ehkä Eedeniksi,
Aatamin asuntomaiksi,
Paratiisiksi paraaksi.
Mitäs vielä viimeiseksi
Vaatimus on Rautalammin?
Onko siellä ollenkana
Kuten muilla muutamilla
Viljavasti viemisiä
Maalimankin markkinoillen,
Joista tuloa tulisi
Vähänkänä valtiollen.
Mutt ei miehet Rautalammin
Ole liikoja lukenna
Tilastoihin, tietoihinsa,
Kysymyksiin komitean;
Sitä vaan he vaatisivat
Että se entinen linja
Tarkoin tutkittu tulisi,
Saisi säädyn suostumusta,
Tulisi jo tehtäväksi
Suonenjoelta Suolahtehen.
Kyll' ois' vielä kehumista,
Kuten miehillä muillakin,
Vaan oomme liiaksi likiset
Kehumahan kuntiamme.
Vaan se kuuluis kauniimmalta,
Kuin se kuuluis toisten kautta
Kehuminen, kiittäminen.
Viel' ois sana sanottava
Seudustakin seutukunnan,
Kuinka tääll' on suuret kosket,
Vesiseudut verrattomat.
Jos ois jokin kulkukeino
Paikkakunnalla parempi,
Totta syntyis suurempia
Tehtahia tehtäväksi;
Kosket kovat, kuohuvaiset
Tulolähteeksi tulisi.
Vielä viimeksi sanelen
Kokouksesta komitean.
Kiitän herroja hyviä,
Palmeenillen sanon paljon,
Joka johti komitean.
Kaikk' oli käytös kansallista,
Seurassa sopiva sääntö;
Enkä kuullut ensinkänä
Herrain ruotsillen rupeevan,
Kuten tahtoo tapa olla;
Kaikki kävi keskustelut
Suomen suorilla sanoilla,
Talonpojan tuttavalla.
MUISTELMIA IISALMEN
NÄYTTELYSSÄ KÄYNNISTÄ 1895.

Kesän kiireitten perästä

Juohtui mielehen minullen
Nähdä sitä näyttelyä
Maamme maanviljeliöiden;
Katsoa myös kaupunkia
Siell' Iisalmessa isossa.
Sitten läksin liikkehellen
Oman ruunan rattahilla.
Matka joutui, tie lyheni
Suonenjoellen sukkelasti,
Josta vilisti veturi
Kiirehesti Kuopiohon.
Siitä sitten sievä laiva,
Ilma ilkkuen veteli
Maaningalle mahtavasti;
Siit' lisalmehen isosti.
Siell' oli tehty siisti portti,
Vierahillen valmistettu
Aivan liki laituria;
Jost' oli kulku kaunistettu,
Köynnöksillä koristettu,
Liput pantu liehumahan.
Oli myöskin oivanlailla
Käsityötä kaikenmoista
Pantu paljon nähtäväksi.
Varsinkin ol' vaimonpuolten.
Näitä kaikkee katsellessa,
Kaupunkia kierrellessä
Kului päivä puolisellen,
Kello kolmenkin kohalle.
Sitten miehet murkinallen
Alkoivat nyt astuskella,
Käydä kestikievarihin;
Johon meinasin minäkin
Päästä kanssa puolisellen,
Herkkuloillen herraspöydän,
Koska oli ohjelmassa
Saada ruokoa rahalla
Ilman säädyn erotusta.
Vaan siinäpä sitä erehyin.
Kun mä astuin astimia
Mennäkseni murkinoillen,
Tuli miesi tuntematon
Perässäni porstuassa;
Sepä seisotti minua,
Sanovi sanalla tuolla:
» Mihin aiot miesi mennä,
Mikä asia sinulla?»
Siihen vastasin vahillen:
»Jos ma pääsen puolisellen,
Herkkuloillen herraspöydän».
Siihen vahti vastoapi:
»Ei täällä sinun sijoa
Tällä tunnilla tulisi.
Kaikk' on tilat tilattuna,
Sa'allen hengellen salia
Istuimia ilmoitettu,
Ettet pääse ensinkänä,
Kuin et oottane ovella,
Koska käypi kello neljä,
Siihen asti herrat syövät;
Sitte saat suuhusi sinäkin.»
Siihen vastasin vahillen,
Etten oota ollenkana,
Jälkiruuillen ruvenne;
Ei vielä tuhoa tule,
Hätäpäivä päällen käyne,
Kosk' on kontissa evästä,
Tämän tuiman tukkeheksi.
Sitten läksin mä samassa.
Enpä tällä ensinkänä
Kertoelmalla ketänä
Tahdo loukata lopuksi
Enkä vahtia vakaista.
Tottapahan minun tunsi
Talonpoika-tolvanaksi;
Vielä lie vaatteista varonut
Halvaksi sen haltijata.
Ei tästä tään enempi
Ole mulla mieli musta;
Vaikka rupesin runollen,
Kertoelin kumppanillen,
Mitä matkalla tapahtui,
Näkemiä näillä mailla.
Vielä kerron viimeiseksi
Näitten seutujen somuutta,
Luonnon kaiken kauneutta.
Ihmettelin itsekseni,
Kuink' on Luoja luomisessa
Toimittanut toiset seudut,
Silloin jo sileiksi tehnyt,
Kuin on kuu kokohon pantu,
Kuin on aurinko alettu,
Laskettuna maan perustus,
Ett' on muokata mukavat,
Viljellä on sangen sievät;
Ei oo kiven kiertämistä,
Louhikoitten lohkomista,
Niinkuin ompi niillä seuduin,
Mistä kertoja kotosin
Läänin suuren länsipuolta,
Rautalammin rantamailta.
TEATERIHUONEELLA JUHLASSA
KYLVETTÄJÄIN HYVÄKSI
KUOPIOSSA.

Ansainneeko aineheksi,
Ottaa puheeksi pakina,
Sanella saunaväestä,
Kyllin kylpyvierahista?
Vai lie aine aivan huono
Sanella runosanoiksi?
Vaan kuin sanoo sananlasku,
Että kaikki kelpajaakin
Laulajallen virren laadut;
Kun vaan saisi sattumahan
Sanan synnyt syitä myöten,
Luottehet lomia myöten.
Vesi on aivan arvollista
Ollut aikojen alusta.
Vettä kaikki kaipajaapi,
Koko Luojan luomakunta.
Vettä aivan arvosteli
Entiset esi-isätkin,
Koska sanoiksi sanovat
Kalevankin kansalaiset:
Ilma on emoja ensin,
Vesi vanhin veljeksiä.
Entäs nyt nykyinen aika,
Kuin on tarkat tutkimukset
Veden voimasta valittu,
Mitä auttais kylmä kylpy,
Mitä lämmin miellyttäisi,
Mitä savi, mitä suola,
Mitä höyry höydyttäisi —
Etten taida tarkemmasti
Nimittää niitä nimiä,
Mitä saapi saunavieras
Veden voimasta kokea
Kylpytiellä käydessänsä.
Kun on nyt tavaksi tullut,
Kylpykeino keksittynä,
Jota suosii suuret herrat,
Rouvat myöskin rohtonansa,
Viinit, hienot ryökkynätkin,
Ehkäpä ei pahaa tekisi
Höyrykylpy kyntäjällen,
Saada vähän virkistystä.
Mieli maistuisi mesillen,
Hunajallen höyrähtäisi;
Kuten tämän kertojankin,
Kun on ollut osallisna
Kylpijänä Kuopiossa.
Ehkä vaikutti vesikin,
 Virkistänyt vanhan mieltä,
Kun hän kiireellä kyhäsi
Runon kehnon kylpijöillen,
Saunaväellen saneli.

KIRURGISESSA SAIRAALASSA OLOSTANI HELSINGISSÄ; 11

p. jouluk. 1898.

Mieleni minun tekeepi,

Ajuni ajatteleepi
Sanoa muuan sananen
Sängyn päältä seljältäni;
Vaan sen arvaa jo alussa
Ettei sairaasta sepästä
Takojata tai'a tulla,
Kun on aju ahtahalla,
Hermot heikossa tilassa;
Ei ne liiku liukkahasti,
Sanele runo-sanoja,
Kun ei mieli mesillen maistu,
Hunajallen höyrähtele.
Onpa käsikin olasta
Kovin käynyt kankiaksi,
Kaiketikin kalvosesta,
Ettei taho tuosta tulla
Miehen mietteistä mitänä.
Luonto kuitenkin lupaapi
Tapa vanha vietteleepi
Että pikkusen pitäisi
Kihnutella kirjoitusta
Mitä mielessä makaapi.
Mitäs virkan vuotehilta,
Sairasvuoteelta sanelen,
Onko lysti olo siinä,
Mieli mukava levätä.
Vaikk' on sängyt säädylliset,
Perin pehmiät levätä,
Aik' on siltä aivan pitkä,
Pääsemistä päivän päähän,
Yöt ne kahta katkerammat;
Tämän tietääpi kokenut,
Kokematon tät' ei tienne.
Viel' on vanhalla varotus
Lause muuan lausuttava
Nuorisollen nousevallen,
Kansallemme kasvavallen,
Kuinka terveys olisi
Katsottava kaikin puolin,
Ettei tuollen turmiota
Tehtäisi tahallisesti.
Terveys on kullan kallis
Kansan kaikella ijällä;
Ei sitä vastaa kullan arvo,
Eikä hopian hyvyydet.
Vielä lausun laitoksesta,
Kodista kirurgisesta,
Kuin on kaikelta kohalta
Juuri julkinen rakennus,
Jossa vissit virkamiehet,
Rohvessoorit rohkeasti,
Tohtorit tekevät työnsä.
Vaikk' on vaivat monenlaiset,
Leikkaukset satalukuiset,
Jotka täällä tehtänehen,
Onnistuu ne oivan lailla;
Kansallemme kallis taito.
Entäs ne ihanat immet
Hellät hoitajattaremme!
Kyllä vaatii virka tämä
Paljon heiltä palvelusta,
Huolellista hoitamista.
Viel' on laitos laitettuna
Siltä kannalta siveeksi,
Ett' on siellä sielun hoito,
Kaikkein kallihin tavara,
Sairahillen saatavana.
Se on herkku hengellinen,
Jota siellä jokaiselle
Täysin määrin tarjotahan.
Ei oo puutosta papista
Siinä selvässä valossa,
Jonka Jeesus jätti meillen.
Kun nyt tunnen terveyteni
Jälleen saaneeni jälellen,
Niin on kyllin kiittäminen;
Ilomielellä iloitsen.
Ja ei oo minulla muuta
Jättää muistoksi jälellen
Tällen Suomen sairaalallen
Kuin tää kehno kiitokseni,
Runomuotohon mukailtu.