Sport Record :: Sports Records Papers

Sport RecordThe founding father of the surpassing Movement, Pierre de Coubertin, referred to the pastime record as having the same function in the ideology of Olympism as the principle of gravity in Newtonian chemical mechanism (Loland 1995). The record was, so to speak, the eternal axiom of sport. No doubt, Coubertin was right in many ways. The spell for records is a key element in our fascination for sports. Records are the stuff of which legends and myths are made. Johnny Weissmullers 1924 one hundred measurement freestyle swim under the minute, Wilma Rudolphs fabulous sprint records from the early 1960s, and Michael Johnsons explosive deuce hundred meter record run at the 1996 Atlanta Games, are all paradigmatic examples of Coubertins ideals. The record stands as a symbolic heart and soul of human greatness and infinite possibility. However, as will be shown in this paper, the record idea is not unproblematic. First, sport records are delimit. Second, based on critical, co nceptual analyses, the logic of the record is examined and possible consequences are discussed of the continuous require for new records. Finally, some reflections are presented on alternative lines of developments in sport in which the status of the record idea is drastically reduced.Record Sports, quasi(prenominal) Record Sports, and GamesA sport record is a performance, measured in necessitate mathematical-physical entities (meters, seconds or kilograms) within a regularise spatio-temporal framework defined by sport rules, that is better than all previous performances measured in the same way. Typical record sports are athletics, swimming, and weight lifting. Record sports fork over to satisfy strict requirements on both standardization of conditions and on have measurement of performance. A series of sport disciplines satisfy one of these deuce criteria. In marathon running and cross-country locomoteing, performances are measured and compared by exact timing, but there are no standardized arenas. The capital of Massachusetts Marathon is rather different from the one in Oslo. The conditions and trails of cross-country ski races vary from race to race. We sometimes talk of records here, but in an outside way. Disciplines with exact performance measurements but without strictly standardized frameworks can possibly better be called quasi-record sports. Other sport disciplines have well-defined standardized spatial frameworks but do not measure performances in exact ways. In terms of arenas, soccer and tennis are more or less identical from match to match. Performances, however, are measured in non-precise entities wish goals, points, sets, and games. Moreover, performances are in a sense relative as they aim upon social interaction with other competitors.