A royal anniversary is, in any normal year, one of the biggest events in the British cultural calendar. But in 2012 it will face stiff competition. England are going to Poland and Ukraine for the European football championships no doubt accompanied by the usual patriotic euphoria. But even this will look like small change once the Olympic machine begins to roll. The numbers are giddy: a real budget of more than £12bn (some 3bn over the official maximum); 302 gold medals; 10,000 athletes, and twice as many journalists; plus innumerable coaches and officials, sponsors and factotums. Almost every UK department of state, security agency and London local authority will be engaged for months with the process, and the power of the world's hyperactive and hyperconnected media systems will be concentrated in the British capital.
"How did we get to this?" is the question posed by Mihir Bose in The Spirit of the Game. How did sport become such an ethically and symbolically charged dimension of our global culture? How and why did the forces of money and power come to take it so seriously? I'm not sure that it was his intention, or if he knew quite what he was letting himself in for, but Bose has ended up trying to answer these questions by writing a global history of modern sport.
The heart of the book is in the opening chapters, where Bose recounts the emergence of Victorian sporting culture in British public schools and the invention of modern Olympics by one of its greatest devotees, Baron De Coubertin. It was in these movements that the notion that organised sporting competition could have an ethical meaning and a practical political purpose were first forged. The former crystallised as an imperial muscular Christianity, the later as a form of quasi-religious cosmopolitanism. These ideas spread alongside the newly codified sports of football, rugby, cricket and athletics through Britain's formal and informal empires and through the Olympic movement too.
Bose does well in the middle third of the book to cover the enormous sweep of what followed: the relationship between nationalism, fascism, communism and sport in the interwar world; the rise of commercialism, professionalism and the modern sports media in the US and Europe; sport's place in the global cold war; China's re-engagement with sport since the Cultural Revolution; and the late, great dynamic rise of Indian cricket as a global player.
Mostly, Bose is an entertaining guide. His inclusion in the narrative of the rising powers of Asia is welcome and his account of modern Indian cricket is closely observed and genuinely original. But for all that, this is a disappointingly old-school version of the tale.
British sports and Victorian sports cultures have never been the only games in town. Their development was paralleled by the global spread of baseball and basketball from America, cycling and fencing from France, and the spread of Nordic and Alpine sports. More recently, skateboarding, surfing, and extreme sports, surely emblematic of a postmodern era of sporting informality and individualism, have acquired a global reach and changed the meaning of what sport is and why we engage with it.
Perhaps even more importantly, sport has never been just for boys, though so many have tried to keep it that way. The gendered nature of sport is surely the most enduringly problematic element of all sporting cultures, but there is no room at all for this in Bose's account.
In the concluding chapter he brings things up to date with a sharp-eyed and occasionally sharp-tongued survey of today's sporting pathologies: corporate greed, match-fixing, doping, corrupt and incompetent governance. It's a pretty depressing picture. So why, despite this, has sport acquired such cultural weight and continued to be bound to moral purposes?
Bose rightly finds comparisons between sport and religion unsatisfactory. Nor does he believe that professional sport is a source of effective role models. So what can it do? At its best, Bose suggests, sport can and has challenged crude forms of racism, proved a useful diplomatic tool and helped build communities of resistance among the marginalised although it has, of course, provided the means for precisely the opposite of all of these as well. In recognising this, Bose appears, in one vital respect, to have broken from his Victorian and Olympian heroes: getting sport right is a matter of choice and conflict in a word, of politics. Whether a new and better sporting politics can be created from a history as top-down and Anglocentric as The Spirit of the Game is another matter.
David Goldblatt is the author of The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football (Penguin)
