ABSTRACT
Around 1900 there was a revolution in the Danish sportsman’s pattern of movement with the transition from the elegant figure skating to the race against the clock that is speed skating. We can note a trend in which the male ideal, in parts of the bourgeoisie, changed from having been ‘the elegant man’ – which in turn was based on the standards of aristocratic exercises – to being ‘the fast man’. Concepts such as grace, style and perfection of form, which had been central ideas in the Northern European nobleman’s dance, fencing and horse riding, became much less important in male bourgeois culture but partly carried on in new forms as a specifically female culture. Working-class men were not much drawn to the time sports, favouring instead power sports such as weightlifting, wrestling and boxing, in which the ideal was the strong man, and where the experiences of sweat, close bodily contact and direct physical struggle, man against man, were central.
