Of Ice and Men by Fred Hogge

Author:Fred Hogge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2022-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

7 Fun and (Ice) Games

Once upon a time, when I was ten years old,I we used to have a favorite winter game at school. When the weather was cold enough, we’d bring cups of hot water out on the playground before class and pour it in long strips on the tarmac. By break, which was at 10:45 in the morning, these would have frozen into ice runs. The idea was then to run full tilt at the head of this line of black ice and… slide.

Why the teachers never stopped us, I’ll never know. But this game was indulged until somebody hurt themselves and all the kids were sent to play indoors until break was over.

In the winter of 1982, that somebody who hurt themselves was me.II

I mention this because, in one of those strange coincidences one finds when researching a book like this, 174 years and one week prior to my silly accident, pretty much to the hour, a Norwegian-Danish army officer called Olaf Rye launched himself, before an audience of fellow soldiers gathered outside the Eidsberg church in Østfold, Norway, a staggering nine-and-a-half meters through the air in the world’s first recorded ski jump.

Captain Rye did not, on this occasion, knock out his teeth; though, in the course of a celebrated military career, who knows, he may have suffered some kind of dental accident. Instead, he had a square named after him in Oslo, among many other honors, and he remains a skiing pioneer and Danish national hero.

Despite Rye’s outrageous feat, ski jumping would not become a competitive sport for another fifty-nine years, when the first event was staged in HauglibakkenIII on March 8, 1868.IV But it’s appropriate that the act was both first performed and staged as a sport in Scandinavia. For it is in the lands of the Norse that skiing was most likely invented. Certainly, it is where much of our first evidence of the practice can be found.

Skiing, skating, and sledging have existed for as long as humanity has lived with snow and ice. But their permeation into the wider world in the form of recreation is a relatively recent phenomenon, and broadly concurrent with the story of our adoption of ice and refrigeration to preserve our food and ship it around the world. This is, in no small part, connected to the same wider social forces that have shaped our air-cooled and refrigerated world.

Throughout the mid-to-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we see an explosion of recreation. It ranges from the proliferation of pubs and bars to ice cream parlors to the codification of sport as we understand it today. The first draft of the Laws of the Game, for example, which laid out the rules of Association Football, was written in 1863. The first indoor athletics meeting was held that same year. Cricket, which is known to have existed in one form or another since 1597, becomes the game we know today in 1864, when over-arm bowling was legalized and the first edition of WisdenV appears.

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