The Idea of the Record
Jim Parry
Introduction
This paper examines the idea of the sports record and its relation to our ideas of excellence, achievement and progress. It begins by recovering and reviewing the work of Richard Mandell, whose definition of the record emphasizes three central ideas: statistic, athletic and recognition. It then considers the work of Henning Eichberg, Allen Guttmann and Mandell, [1] from the 1970s onwards, on the genesis of the modern sports record, explaining and developing their ideas via a distinction between descriptive and emulative records, and between different kinds of emulative records. This then permits an analysis of contemporary athletic and sports records. The idea of the 'significant record' will also be advanced, offering the four-minute mile as an example, alongside the breaking of the sound barrier and the ascent of Everest, in an attempt to explicate our continuing fascination with such exceptional achievements.
Since it has often been argued that the origins of our modern concern with records are rooted in the idea of modernity itself (rationalization, standardized conditions, ever more sophisticated means of quantification, the role of applied science and, more generally, of the scientific world-view), it then looks at the contribution of recent discussions of sport technologies and the logic of quantifiable progress, [2] considering the place and importance of relative emulation and of the qualitative evaluation of sporting performances.
Finally, in examining the ideas of excellence, progress and achievement, the paper will try to put 'our obsession with records' [3] in perspective, as but one way in which we respond to and evaluate sporting performance.
The idea of the record
In his seminal paper 'The invention of the sports record', Mandell says that the 'idea of the record' is young. [4] 'The notion of the sports record is itself a refined product of a complex of ideas and practices unique to a democratic, industrial society.' [5] His initial definition of the record is that it is a 'generally acknowledged statistic indicating the unique nature of a supreme athletic performance of a recognized kind'. [6] Let us examine in turn the three central ideas of this definition: statistic, athletic and recognized.
1. A. statistic ā an abstract
In Ancient Greek competition, for example, 'winners were always decided in proximate comparisons or contests; the victory was over someone else' and so 'the victor lived in history; his performances did not'. [7] In the eighteenth century, Englishmen, he says, began to race against time or distance, and so began the 'fascination for performance in the abstract', [8] made possible only through the existence of more finely calibrated instruments for the measurement of time or distance. Universal records then depended on the development of communications networks to assist the harmonization of standards and the emergence of democracy and equality of opportunity.
So ancient athletes ran in the present particular - their contests were against each other in the here and now - whereas modern athletes also run against the abstract, timeless standard that is the record.
2. Athletic (not āsportingā) performance ā sports records or athletic records?
From pedestrianism (the walking and running feats and races of the eighteenth century), via the invention of the stopwatch, to the four-minute mile - the image at the forefront of the mind for authors such as Eichberg, Mandell and Guttmann in the 1970s seems to have been that of the individual runner - of the athlete, not the sportsman or the gymnast. [9] The nature of the athlete's interest in both the present and the abstract is produced by the kind of performance assessment possible - the actual performance being precisely measured and quantified in units.
By contrast, the footballer is not primarily interested in the statistics of the game, or the quantification of his or her team's performance. [10] Rather he or she is interested in the qualities of the performances of the individuals and of the team as a whole. Such an interest is conditioned by the fact that such qualities produce the result.
Of course, the actual result involves quantification to the minimal extent of goal-counting; and there may be a further interest in the relation of that actual result to the accumulation of points in a league, or to progress to the next round of a knockout competition. But this is quite different from athletic quantification, in which the athlete's actual performance is quantified.
Brownell acknowledges that, at least for Eichberg, the 'quintessential' modern sport was track and field athletics, which is a sport that lends itself to 'easy' measurement, standardization and comparison. [11] Its salience in the 'Eichberg/Guttmann/Mandel hypothesis' [12] is an indicator that the nature and importance of other sports, equally as modern, might have been overlooked in virtue of the 'nice fit' of athletics. For other modern sports retain other kinds of assessment or record-keeping than that identified by the hypothesis as the quintessentially modern record.
For example, the concern of footballers with 'world records' is minimal. Scarcely any meaningful ones exist, because of the very different contexts and conditions within which contests take place, and the very different qualities exhibited on different occasions. 'Abstract' achievements at the world level don't make much sense, apart from the primitive counting of national victories in the World Cup. And yet football is the world's most popular sport. Codified in England in 1863, it meets all Guttmann's criteria of modernity except for the obsession with records.
Not all sports keep world records, as the achievements in some events are too dependent on the layout of the course or venue, which may not be bounded by precise rules. Other sports or events do keep records, but do not regard them as particularly significant - for instance, marathon world records are regarded as far less important than on-track athletic events.
I think this shows that, whereas the origins and development of modern sports are indeed directly linked in many ways to the modernization and civilizing processes, the role and importance of quantification in those processes must be examined sport by sport. And the kind of quantification observable as important in some of the most popular world sports (e.g. standardization of playing areas, line markings, goals etc.) is not the kind important for its records. Whereas athletic records are typically universal, some other sports records are typically not. This is an important observation, given the role and importance of quantification in relation to the record in the Eichberg/ Mandell/Guttmann hypothesis.
The problem of recognition
Mandell notes that, while descriptive records have been with us through the ages, he finds the first use of'record' in a sporting context in 1868, and he credits Montague Shearman as 'the first sports historian to use the term "record" alone with the assurance that his audience would know that he was referring to sports performances'. [13] To become a record, a performance has to be recognized by some competent authority. For example, now that we have established international federations in many sports, they are responsible for setting, maintaining and monitoring the conditions for record-setting.
Mandell further notes that, 'since they were invented by Anglo-Saxons in the late nineteenth century, records have continued to improve - this providing irrefutable evidence for the dynamic idea of progress'. [ 14] The point here is that such an idea of progress is dependent on the context it inhabits - and the context here is that of the competent authority that has the power to determine the conditions of recognition of a particular performance as a record.
Peter Radford, a former British Olympic sprinter, has recently described a number of eighteenth-century attempts to complete a sub-four-minute mile. [15] In his view, there is good evidence to suppose that 'professionals', running for wagers, were successful in their attempts, but that the Victorians who codified our sports were 'ideologically driven to exclude large parts of society' so as to eliminate 'unfair' competition from those who competed for money or whose jobs gave them advantages. For a while, two sets of records were kept, but then the earlier ones were forgotten and a new era of amateur athletics began.
The Amateur Athletic Association was able to determine the conditions of acceptance of an athlete, a performance, a venue and measuring instruments. Indeed, the earlier performances cannot be verified for accurate measurement of distance and time, a level track, the requisite conditions for a 'race' having been observed and so on - and they were done by professionals. Radford concludes:
And so on 6 May 1954, almost exactly 184 years after James Parrott's first four-minute mile, Roger Bannister became the first amateur to run a mile in four minutes on a flat, level 440-yard track. It was an immense achievement. ... It should not, however, overshadow the achievements of those pioneers who went before, men who dreamed of, and may well have achieved, the four-minute mile more than 150 years earlier, but who did it for money. [16]
If Radford is right, some pre-modern performances challenge those of the twenty-first century - which should lead us to wonder just how good those athletes of yore would have been if they had been assisted by modern technologies (footwear, other equipment, track materials and preparation, sport science applications, nutritional analysis, food supplementation - even doping).
The problem of recognition, then, may be partly to do with the difficulty of recognizing 'pre-modern' performances, because they were inadequately quantified or standardized. But it may also be to do with the ideology of recognition, according to which certain performances are excluded on social, political or moral grounds.
The Eichberg/Guttmann/Mandell hypothesis
Let's back up a little and review: the Eichberg/Guttmann/Mandell hypothesis says that modern sports are different from the games, pastimes and sports played before the Industrial Revolution, Modern sports emerged along with industrial society, and both are characterized by an emphasis on achievement, rationalization and quantification, suggesting seven interrelated characteristics of modern sports: secularism, equality, bureaucratization, specialization, rationalization, quantification and (the obsession with) records. [17] This is not to say that pre-modern sports had none of these characteristics, or that all modern sports have them all - just that modern sports each involve a systematic interaction of some or all of them, and to a greater degree. For example, there is a dispute as to whether ancient sports were quantified. Did ancient Egyptian archers seek to shoot arrows through thicker metallic targets than each other? Did Greeks seek to surpass rivals by winning a series of events? Did medieval heralds keep score at tournaments?
The exchange of letters between Carter and Guttmann (both 1979) clarify what is at issue here. Carter asserts that 'surely medieval "athletes" kept records, even if only in their heads', and equates both 'lusting to unhorse' the opponent and 'the desire to outperform' him with 'breaking the record', [18] Guttmann's response is that noting something down, seeking to out-perform the opponent or counting outcomes none of these counts as even close to the modern conception of the record.
Kruger and Ito also dispute the claim that quantification of physical performance specifically characterizes and spreads from modern industrial society Offering an account of the Japanese chikaraishi (rock-lifting competition), primarily from 1664 to the Meiji era, the authors claim a 'natural' desire to win and to quantify and record performances among various elements of the Japanese population; thus, they argue that the process of measuring and recording performance output was neither unique to nor entirely dependent upon Western culture, and may even be a cultural universal.
Here we must simply repeat a point previously made: the claim of the Eichberg/Guttmann/Mandell hypothesis is not that pre-modern sports had none of the characteristics they identify, nor that all modern sports have them all - just that modern sports each involve a systematic interaction of some or all of them, and to a greater degree. Chikaraishi may have elements of measuring and recording, b...
