Zeidler Miklós: Sporting Spaces - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)

An invoice of the Velodrom bicycle school (1904)

prior to the establishment of the College of Physical Education in 1925. The burgeoning of various gymnastics associations in the second half of the century was in part due to the fact that their members could go in for every kind of fashionable sports activities besides gymnastics proper-including dancing and fire-fighting. Women, too, began to show more and more interest in sports; schools were established to offer exercises adapted to their needs in a spirit of turn-of-the-century modernity.

It may be surprising today that, when it was introduced to Hungary, bicycle riding was regarded an indoor sport for quite some time. Of course, the majority went on smaller or larger biking tours or cycled to the parks of Budapest for a few “merry circles”; novices to this form of entertainment did not, however, purchase bicycles of their own but paid a fee to take a few rounds in one of the cycling halls formed by opening a number of apartments in one or another tenement house of the inner city. The finest of these indoor halls was the circular building of the Velodrome standing by the end of Városliget fasor.

As we have seen, it was at the turn of the century that the number of sports facilities grew most spectacularly. That was when today’s oldest existing football pitches and track and field facilities came into being; the first of these was the Millenary Racing Track built to serve as the venue of the 1896 open-air events (gym8