ABSTRACT
The historiography of the evolution of sport since the later nineteenth century is very much predicated on sources that are considered factual and that concentrate on sport itself. The bureaucracies that govern the various games and competitions that constitute current sports have been, some of them, in existence for a very long time. The Society of St Andrews Golfers began in 1754, the Marylebone Cricket Club in 1787, and others proliferated – and have continued to function – throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The archives that these bureaucracies have created and preserved afford the historian with matchless sources of material. They can be supplemented if necessary with the documentation that became technologically possible and socially approved after 1800: individual team and club records, newspaper reports, eye-witness accounts, photographs, fi lm documentaries, and the like. In the presence of so many ‘scientifi c’ sources of knowledge – and of the resultant mindset that privileges facts over insight – no one thinks now of turning to fi ctional and artistic representations of athletics for reliable information on a particular sport. It is not so much that they are untrustworthy as it is that they have been rendered irrelevant.
