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

What is meant by the word sport? Its meanings today seem to include play, entertainment and, increasingly, a means of expressing and actualising the self, a way of maintaining mental hygiene. A profession for many, it is a mostly peaceful way for individuals (and nations) of competing with each other, a spectacle which has, incidentally, been turned into big business and, sometimes, politics.

Two and a half millennia ago the cultivated citizen of Athens would have given a similar answer asserting, in a spirit of chalokagathia (unity of the beautiful and the good), that sport provided a forum for perfecting body and soul for their own sake, of displaying the ideal of humanity, and of giving free reign to the competitive spirit in humanity. However, for the people of later times, up to the 19th century, the cult of physical prowess tested in competition manifested itself in much cruder forms. The complex culture of the body characterising classical antiquity and the institutions of this culture (such as the Olympics and other festive games) were forgotten for a long time. Such sports facilities of the period as its gymnasia, stadia and amphitheatres either disappeared or survived as ruinous relics of a bygone era.

The emergence of modern sport was made possible in the wake of the Enlightenment by the intellectual- political theory and practice of democracy. It can hardly be accidental that modern sport and the principle of fair play were born in nineteenth-century Britain, the home of political liberalism and the free market economy. In England, a country where both a prestigious aristocracy and a strong bourgeois middle-class were in place, this old-new ideal allowed the aristocratic mentality of belonging to the chosen few and the self-esteem of the middle classes buttressed by the proverbial bourgeois work ethic to assert themselves simultaneously.

In nineteenth-century Hungary, England was an object of admiration. It is common knowledge that his travels in England inspired count István Széchenyi to promote sporting activities in Hungary as well as to urge the implementation of social and economic reform. From mid-century on, such new sports became popular and were perfected in the country’s high society as gymnastics, rowing, swimming, while the rules of tra3