ABSTRACT
One of the things that it is important to understand about sport is that it has never been understood. The principal reason why discourse about sport could be home to so many myths and platitudes was that for generations after it came into being it was barely studied at all in any disciplined kind of way. It is our contention that to understand modern sport one must understand its nature and that to understand its nature one must understand its origins. The modern organised games and athletic competitions, synthesised and described together by the end of the nineteenth century as 'sport' in the British Isles, 'sports' in the United States and by similar derivations in a wide variety of languages and cultures, comes with a kind of ethical component in its core meaning. The nature of sport has been subjected to the kind of philosophical investigation applied to art and religion. Its origins have been described in endlessly repeated myths.
