A History of Sports Coaching in Britain by Dave Day Tegan Carpenter

Author:Dave Day, Tegan Carpenter [Dave Day, Tegan Carpenter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Social History, Sports & Recreation, Coaching
ISBN: 9781317686309
Google: zTuvCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-08T16:11:50+00:00

6 Cold War influences

Introduction

Given the increasing globalization of sport throughout the twentieth century it was difficult for the traditional British amateur approach to coaching and training to establish any degree of worldwide credibility, especially in the light of ongoing defeats and disappointments. The British model had never been the only exemplar for the international sporting community and the consistently successful American system, predicated around the use of professional coaches and intensive training techniques, had become the gold standard for Western nations by the 1940s. In the confrontational political climate of the post-war period (the ‘Cold War’), a challenge to American sporting supremacy arose in the form of state-sponsored systems of athletic preparation in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, regimes which also focused on professional coaching and systematic modes of training.1 There was a significant difference, however, between the two systems in that, in contrast to the centrality of the American colleges and private enterprise athletic clubs, the Soviet Union re-directed significant resources from the government to develop a comprehensive sport system that included an increasingly sophisticated use of sports science and formal coach education programmes. The subsequent rivalry between these sporting superpowers radically changed global attitudes to coaching and consigned the British amateur model to the annals of history, as Soviet and American successes encouraged other nations, including Britain, to adopt a much more specialized sporting model based around government support, science and coach education.

Soviet sport before the Second World War

Tsarist Russia was one of the founding members of the modern Olympic movement, although Russian athletes did not compete until 1908 when the five contestants achieved one gold and two silver medals, placing them fourteenth overall. As a result, the Russian government established an Olympic Committee, which provided financial support to send a larger team to Stockholm, although it only managed one silver and three bronze medals. As with the British in 1912, these results were perceived as anything but a success since they had exposed Russia as a ‘backward country in the sphere of sport’.2 In an attempt to remedy the situation, and to improve the nation’s physical wellbeing, the Tsarist government developed a state organization to manage sport, the Office of the General Supervisor for the Physical Development of People in Russia.3 The outbreak of war in 1914 and the need for a large number of physically fit soldiers further emphasized the need for physical training. These two key aspects, nationalism and militarism provided the key foundation stones for the subsequent Soviet sport system.4

Russia organized its own ‘Olympiads’ in 1913 and 1914, but it would be another forty years before Russian athletes participated in the Olympics again.5 The Soviet Union was formed in 1922 and, as a result of an increasing resistance to the West in general, the new nation declined on ideological grounds to affiliate with ‘bourgeois’ Western-dominated sporting events.6 Instead, focus was placed on a system, ‘based on a distinctly proletarian brand of sport and physical culture’, which shunned individualism and competition.7 Physical culture was developed as a

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