Skiing underwent substantial changes during the post-war years when the sport turned into a multi-billion dollar industry and a leisure activity for the masses. Despite its global nature and popularity, skiing in academic writing has not gained much recognition. This paper explores the role of knowledge transfer during the pioneering phase of post-war skiing in Australia. It describes the life of Charles William Anton, an Austrian refugee from the Anschluss who migrated to Sydney and subsequently became one of the founding fathers of Australian post-war skiing. The following pages show the multi-layered nature of skiing as a global sport by exemplifying how ideas spread from pre-war Europe to post-war Australia. The paper will also provide a case study about refugee knowledge transfer and the 'productive process of absorption, adoption or rejection of knowledge' that takes place once an idea has been introduced into a new environment.

The revelation that women first played Australian Rules football during the period of the Great War is an important element in overall understandings of how both masculine and feminine ideals were challenged and redefined by sporting practices in a time of general social flux. This paper reveals that the genesis of the women's code was in Western Australia, where contests occurred as early as 1915. Three years later, with the war nearing its conclusion, the template of women's involvement in charity matches with strong military and patriotic overtones was adopted in the state of Victoria, the code's heartland. Investigations such as this one, indicative of the complex relationships between sport and gender during the First World War, offer scope for deeper comprehension of a much-studied military conflict, and point the way forward for those that bemoan the static agenda of research into women's football.

The scholarship surrounding women's cycling in Australia during the 1890s is slim. However, a focus on female competitive cycling, just one of many diverse cycling activities that women pursued in this era, reveals a rich seam of information. Accordingly, this paper surveys endurance riding, adventure touring and racing, introducing new historical and biographical detail and highlighting the significance of competitive cycling for women in the late nineteenth century. The discussion shows that women's competitive cycling constituted a significant component of Australian cycling history, and helped to re-define women's identity in an era when feminine roles were in flux and the traditional gender order was being contested.

This essay examines the images and looking practices central to Bess M. Mensendieck's (c.1866-1959) 'functional exercise' system, as documented in physical culture treatises published in Germany and the United States between 1906 and 1937. Believing that muscular realignment could not occur without seeing how the body worked, Mensendieck taught adult non-athletes to see skeletal alignment and muscular movement in their own and others' bodies. Three levels of looking practices are examined: didactic sequences; penetrating inspection and appreciation of physiological structures; and ideokinetic visual metaphors for guiding movement. With these techniques, Mensendieck's work bridged the body cultures of German Nacktkultur (nudism), American labour efficiency and the emerging physical education profession. This case study demonstrates how sport historians could expand their analyses to include practices of looking as well as questions of visual representation.

In July 1944 cross-country races and parades of physical culturists were prominently used to celebrate Soviet liberation from German occupation. While journalistic accounts stressed the manly health and vigour of the victorious Red Army, press photographs in Pravda and Red Sport, and Aleksandr Deneika's monumental painting 'Liberation', emphasised images of the young female physical culturist. This essay explores what a contextualised analysis of these images may have to tell historians about the connections between women, physical culture and liberation being projected. The argument suggests that, on one level, the images straightforwardly symbolised and celebrated the liberation of the Soviet 'Motherland'. On another, more complex level, the images represented a particularly nuanced notion of constricted liberation for Soviet women deriving from 1920s eugenic and evolutionary discourse, inscribed into the contemporary imperative for engagement with physical culture as a necessary stage of healthful body discipline on the path to hygienic and successful motherhood.

Modern stadiums were constructed across the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, usually to replace old baseball parks that were run-down, inaccessible by automobile, and located near African American neighbourhoods. Sports promoters coveted affluent, white, consumption-oriented customers who had recently moved to the suburbs. To attract these customers, promoters attempted to imaginatively reconstitute stadium space - from urban, old, dirty, rambunctious, masculine places to suburban, new, clean, orderly, female-friendly spaces. The attraction of women - as signifiers of an affluent and domesticated postwar social order - was central to this strategy. Visual representations of women in new stadium spaces were essential to the imaginative reconfiguration and modernisation of stadium space. This essay examines their use, particularly in the Houston Astrodome. Stadium publications and local newspapers used photographs and illustrations of women to conceptually reinvent the stadium, extending a distinctively post-war, modern ideology privileging comfort, consumption and respectable behaviour into stadium space.

During the 1890s, in Australia and around the world, there was a convergence of the cycle, the camera and women. With the advent of the revolutionary safety bicycle, cycling had become a craze. At the same time, photographic technology had undergone changes that meant photographs were cheaper and more accessible. Women became avid consumers of both these new technologies; they became cyclists in unprecedented numbers for the first time, and they also became the popular subjects, and proud owners, of photographic portraits. These two trends converged, resulting in a proliferation of photographic portraits of women cyclists, many of which were published in newspapers and magazines. These bicycle portraits have now become a rich source for historians. More than just visually interesting artefacts, these photographic depictions of the Australian woman cyclist are important windows into the history of Australian women's cycling in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Bicycle portraits provide significant insights into the study of Australian women cyclists, from historical detail ranging from costume, bicycle and cycling activity choices to more complex understandings of the expression of feminine identity among Australian women cyclists in the 1890s.

The mass popularity of sport in Britain during the inter-war years was a source of fascination and inspiration for a group of artists working at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London. Although largely neglected by their contemporaries, sport was embraced by Grosvenor School artists as a means to engage with both modernity and tradition within contemporary British culture. This essay examines one work, Cyril Power's 1930 linocut print, 'The Eight', as a case study to investigate the interrelationship between two cultural activities frequently regarded as at opposing ends of the cultural spectrum: art and sport. By simultaneously drawing upon a rich heritage of visual culture conventions and deploying new media and methods to represent the excitement, dynamism and sheer energy of sport, Power's work offers an insight into how visual culture can engage with, and enhance, our understanding of contemporary debates and practices in both fields of activity.

This paper highlights the value of images and materiality associated with sport in the past, and explores the range of sociocultural practices associated with them. It provides a critique of the neglect of such sources by many historians and notes that interest is now substantially growing in visuality and visual material. It emphasises the huge breadth and depth of sports-related evidence that can now be accessed, from stamps to stadiums and from posters to sports paraphernalia. It then examines the multiplicity of methodologies that can potentially be used to exploit the visual, its sites of production and sites of reception and seeing.

The history of Chinese group callisthenics can be traced back to the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties. Modern callisthenics was brought to China in the Republic of China Era (1912-49) and developed rapidly in the People's Republic of China Era (1949 to the present). Since the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, group callisthenics has developed in five stages: the formation of systemisation, the breakthrough, the multiple development and the comprehensive development. Today, Chinese group callisthenics has become world-famous and has continued its development from its own system and style.

The rural population in China remains in the majority, and has traditionally played a key role in the development of China. This paper outlines the rhetoric of, and the material changes in the development of rural sports policy in the period since 1949. In effect this represents the largest single programmatic attempt to develop a rural sports policy, and it is one which reflects and contributes to the changing ideology of the state in China. The article explores the historical context of the unfolding of rural sports policy, the rationales provided by state and party leaders and representatives, and the rhetoric employed in supporting such policy direction. The development of policy is described as falling into three periods. From 1949 to 1977 the emphasis was on developing policies to promote labour production and national defence. This was succeeded by a period from 1978 to 2001 in which the major focus was on promoting a culturally positive environment (the construction of a 'spiritual civilization'), while in the period 2002 -08 the concern was with promoting equity and reducing the gap between urban and rural life quality. These developing rationales have sought in a variety of ways to address the major imbalances that exist in Chinese society between urban and rural, Eastern and Western China, and sports policy has thus became a significant tool in China's modernization agenda in the rural context.

This paper reassesses the role of women in judo in Japan, from its secluded and restricted beginnings in the late nineteenth century to the gradual changes in gender and social paradigms triggered by the influence of Western feminist struggle from the 1960s onwards. Judo has been considered in theory an inclusive martial art because its creator, Jigoro Kano, stressed safety, etiquette and moral teachings irrespective of age, size or gender of its adherents. However, the social and cultural environment in Japan has traditionally discriminated against women both outside and inside the dojo (training place). We treat this issue historically, considering the broader context of the Japanese social, political and cultural developments.

Since economic reform in the 1980s, Chinese sport has undergone an extraordinary transformation. The most distinguishing phenomenon is the rapid growth of mass sport at the grassroots level with increasing demands for physical activities in women's daily lives. The rapid growth of women's sports participation at the grassroots is deeply embedded in the process of social stratification as a result of the urbanisation of Chinese society. The purpose of this paper is to use the socialist, feminist and theoretical framework to explore how Chinese women's different economic, educational, domestic and cultural situations shape their sports values and patterns of participation, marking social boundaries in Chinese urban communities. Semi-structured interviews and observations were conducted with 60 female physical exercisers in sports clubs, parks and neighbourhood playgrounds. Documentary research was also applied as a complement method to the interview. The findings indicate that within different classes (middle class, working class and a group who were unemployed), many different opportunities for and limitations on women to participate in sport are noticed. Chinese women have not fully and equally utilised sports opportunities created by urbanisation. Most Chinese women still live within patriarchal arrangements. Consequently, they do not completely fulfil their ambitions in sport.

In the nationalistic atmosphere of the early twentieth century, a nurturing medium for sports practising martial manliness abounded throughout Europe. This framework supported the invention of a new multi-disciplinary sport, aided by Baron Pierre de Coubertin himself: modern pentathlon. Though the idea of a new form of pentathlon was already born in 1894, it took 30 years, until Paris 1924, to establish modern pentathlon within the Olympic Games. This study is concerned with the reasons for that delay. It will be assessed whether the active military preparations around the First World War and the contemporary image of masculinity had a decisive influence on the early history of modern pentathlon. By including historical documents from the IOC archives in Lausanne, Switzerland, the research office for military history in Potsdam, Germany, and the LA84 Foundation in Los Angeles, USA, as well as literature on gender, military sport and Olympic history, this study offers an entirely new view on the early history of a sport that was born in an atmosphere of glorifying manliness and apparent militarism. The history of modern pentathlon thereby provides a particularly appropriate area for the analysis of connections between sport, militarism and masculinity. It was not by chance that the implementation of a combined sport, which included besides swimming and running the three military disciplines of shooting, fencing and horse riding, arose in a pre-war context. Though in 1912 the Great War had not yet begun, the awareness of an upcoming battle was rising and led to a higher attention to Coubertin's almost forgotten assumption of a new sport. In 1924 the advantages were finally admitted on two sides: the army recruited modern pentathletes as future military officers; the sports community appointed skilled officers as successful competitors. Thus the lobby for an Olympic recognition of modern pentathlon was found.

The Ardito was a fighter as well as a competitor whose status as a 'warrior' was based on courage and superior physical performance: a superior man. In addition, his exuberant conduct, both on and off the battlefield, introduced a significant new sub-culture into post-war Italian society, contributing to the attachment of notable value to virility and Mussolini's cult of the 'strong man'. The purpose of this research is to analyse the impact of this 'arditismo' (spirit of daring) on the early post-war period in particular, including the different 'male image' of the Italian citizen, and to study the sense of virility in the transition from the liberal, easy-going 'Little Italy' of Giovanni Giolitti (1842-1928) to a manly, combative, and ambitious nation. Together with some of the vitalistic tendencies in the Futurist movement, the main characteristics and mentality of the ex-Ardito (former Special Forces) would thus be significantly influential in the ideology of nascent Fascism. Indeed, the 'arditismo' influence, together with the article and social movement known as Futurism would constitute the two most highly structured foundations of early Fascist culture, bringing a political and social revolution necessary to create a 'new man'. It was as if the Arditi and the new method of military training had transferred their experience from the military into civilian life, contributing to a renewal of the image of the Italian male in the collective imagination. Indirectly, the image of women would also begin to absorb and adapt to new sports models imported from abroad, which would create for the Italian Ardito, a grudgingly tolerated rival. The main sources for this paper are the archives of the Historical Office of the Army, advertising and manuals from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, placards and graphic publicity from books and journals or private collections, and exhibition catalogues.