Pedestrianism

The Olympic Games offers a quadrennial opportunity to shine the spotlight on some sports that would otherwise languish in obscurity. One such is race walking, which made its first appearance in the 1904 Games with a half-mile race that was part of the early forerunner of the decathlon, the ten-event “all round championship”. In Paris there will be events over 20 kilometres for both men and women and over 50 kilometres for men only.

It is a relatively simple sport, a test of endurance for sure, with only two rules. The competitor’s back toe cannot leave the ground until the heel of their front foot has touched and the supporting leg must straighten from the point of contact with the ground until the body passes directly over it. Infractions are judged by eye – no VAR here.

A filler in the Olympic TV schedules between the more popular track and field events it might be but competitive walking, known then as pedestrianism, was, along with boxing and horse racing, one of the first organized competitive sports in Georgian England. Despite all its grimness the Industrial Revolution did at least provide the masses with some free leisure time and a little spare money and organized sporting events sprang up to give them some entertainment.

In an age when everybody walked, it required little recherche knowledge to appreciate the style and stamina of a good walker and, unlike other sports, there were no barriers to participation. It was a sport that required no equipment and was, at least in theory, open to both rich and poor. Successful competitors could walk away with purses of a size beyond their wildest dreams, certainly more than could hope to have earned over several years.

Pedestrianism aldo provided spectators with an opportunity to participate in two of their favourite pastimes, drinking and gambling. Throughout the first half of the 19^th century publicans would organize pedestrian matches, putting up the competitors, taking care of the advertisement and running a book in the sure and certain knowledge that the event would draw in the crowds, enhancing takings over the bar and providing him with a tidy profit.

Looking over the growth of the sport in his book Pedestrianism (1813), Walter Thom attributed its fashionable status was the result of the “patronage of men of fortune and rank” from the 1760s onwards. Some likened it to an emulation of the noble traditions of the athletes of ancient Greece. The Bristol Gazette in 1815 commented on the number of gentlemen infected by “the rage for walking”. Others adopted a more censorious tone, a correspondent to the Cambrian fulminating that “a whole race of fifty miles a day men had arisen, and what…before was the disease of an individual is now become an epidemic” while the Morning Post called it a “pedestrian mania”.

Victorian distaste for gambling and the consequences of excessive alcohol consumption, at least in public and amongst the masses, together with the suspicion that feats of astonishing endurance were prone to fakery saw pedestrianism fall out of favour. Instead, middle and upper class athletes began to form athletics clubs, from which members of the working class were excluded, and football and cricket clubs. By the end of the 19^th century football rather than pedestrianism had become the opium of the masses.

Along the way, though, pedestrianism had created some of Britain’s earliest sporting heroes, some of whom we shall meet over the next few weeks.