ABSTRACT ‘Tomorrow, Thursday, at 3pm, a football match will take place on the Plaine de Plainpalais, between 11 English from Lausanne and Geneva’. This brief notice, published in January 1869 in Le Journal de Genève, may be one of the earliest mentions in the area’s press of a new ball game – football. Although the chronology of association football’s ‘cultural transfer’ to Switzerland and the conditions that facilitated the game’s introduction to the country are well-documented, the game’s adoption by the local population remains under-researched. Based on extensive empirical research combining original archive materials and articles from contemporary generalist and sports newspapers, the present study explored the factors that led young men in Geneva and Lausanne to embrace a foreign game. It also examined two less-well studied aspects of the game’s early history in Europe: the difficulty of finding places to play football in urban areas and the profiles of football’s first leaders. The results extend previous research on the creation of the first football clubs (association or rugby) outside Great Britain and on the history of associations in Switzerland.

ABSTRACT On 8 April 1920, the first sports editorial cartoon by teenager Jack Nicolle appeared in Health & Strength magazine. The series of illustrations in the world’s oldest physical culture periodical captured the absurdity of ‘circus lifts’ performed at a recent W.A. Pullum lifting exhibition. The piece ignited a torrid eleven-month run of insightful, humorous, and bitingly satirical commentary often directed towards leaders of the British strength community.

ABSTRACT The Empire’s subaltern peoples and its justification in coloniality are strangely absent from British sport history, despite a key strand of the field being grounded in links between Empire, masculinity and sport: in this the subject reflects gaps and silences in British social history more generally. This paper that is both theoretical and historiographical explores this absence and considers ways that it might be addressed. It first sketches the coloniality of sport history as epistemology and ontology through an exploration of the field’s methodological national whiteness as redacting the agency and voice (past and present) of Indigenous and colonial subaltern peoples and implicating sport history in a continuing Imperial Archive. Although necessarily broad brush the paper concludes by examining aspects of the field that disrupt methodological nationalism and methodological whiteness to suggest ways of rethinking and recasting historians’ practice to suggest decolonial methods for British sport history that rupture in analyses of sport the constraints of the nation as anachronism and Whiteness as a fundamental characteristic of British history.

ABSTRACT In 1969, author Bil Gilbert wrote a three-part series on performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) for Sports Illustrated. Garry Valk, publisher of the magazine, characterised the series as ‘the first comprehensive and authoritative study of a vastly complicated problem.’ This study examined the influence of the Gilbert series on newspaper coverage of PEDs and the reactions of policymakers to both the magazine investigation and subsequent newspaper reporting. Coverage of amphetamines and anabolic steroids increased significantly in the three years following the series, while references to anti-inflammatory drugs and painkillers decreased. These patterns reflected an apparent shift from restorative aids to additive substances following the magazine investigation. Additionally, one in three sources cited in Sports Illustrated served as a news source in subsequent press coverage, and some of those sources then testified at government hearings held at the state and national levels. Government hearings on PEDs appeared to function more symbolically than substantively, as did anti-drug campaigns and resolutions in sporting organisations. The study considers implications for sport history and the regulation of performance-enhancing drugs.

ABSTRACT Neither archives nor museums are neutral. They reflect particular sets of priorities: those of the institution; the collectors and curators within them; and those of their intended audiences. In the context of sport, gender is a key influence on these priorities. Yet sporting archives are relatively silent about women's historical involvement in sport. A number of Collaborative Doctoral Partnership projects delivered through Sporting Heritage use oral history as a methodology for academic research and as an intervention in the archive, expanding collections and giving voice to otherwise under-represented groups. In this paper, I focus on issues relating to oral history in heritage settings and in the academic practice of history: the history of the methodology itself and its implications for a shared research agenda, including the extent to which oral history can – and should – be used as a method of historical recovery. In sport heritage and sport history. where men and the masculine have dominated the academic discipline and the practice of collecting, I consider the gendering of oral history, and its implications for such collections. Lastly, I reflect on the critical opportunities offered by this methodological approach, as well as the challenges.

ABSTRACT Table tennis was first played as an Olympic sport at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul. Yet its official body, the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF), had not always sought Olympic recognition. Founded in 1926, the ITTF was in conflict with the Olympic movement in its early years. While the democratised and apolitical vision of table tennis did not appear to be fundamentally at odds with Olympic values, amateurism was an obstacle for the federation. As a result, only after 50 years, in 1977, did the ITTF finally bow to the principles of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Thereafter, Olympic recognition became a major symbolic and economic pillar of the ITTF’s development strategy. The aims of the two institutions became aligned as the popularity of table tennis internationally, particularly in Asia, contributed to the goal of globalising the Olympics. This rapprochement with Asian markets accelerated under the IOC presidency of Juan Antonio Samaranch from 1981, leading to the inclusion of the discipline in the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games.

ABSTRACT Spain in the twentieth century was a country in search of a unified national identity. The Franco regime (1939–75) set this nationalising process as one of its main goals, in order to legitimise itself. In many senses this project failed, and many national symbols ended up with negative associations. This article argues that there was one successful example of promotion of that identity: the use of sports. The national press participated in this process by pushing the ideal of the Spanish quixotic hero, personified by several athletes in individual sports, including cyclist Federico Martín Bahamontes, the first Spanish winner of the Tour de France in 1959. Sports figures like Bahamontes represented this ideal through five main characteristics: idealism to succeed despite humble origins, moral values, perseverance in the face of adversity, irrational and impractical decisions, and heroism for the nation. All these characteristics are studied here through the words of newspapers from the time. The names of these athletes are still invoked today as pioneering examples of great Spaniards, which proves that this aspect of national identity was successful in becoming part of the Spanish collective identity.

Paul Ian Campbell’s latest monograph provides a short but excellent account of the playing and post-playing career experiences of sixteen black former professional footballers, set between 1988 and...