The British Olympic Association: A History

Jefferys, Kevin

doi:10.1057/9781137363428

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…In Britain, Burghley was President of the Amateur Athletic Association (AAA), the longest serving Chair of the BOA, an Olympic medallist, peer and Conservative politician, lauded for his leadership of the 1948 London Olympics. By the early 1950s he was a trusted link between the IOC and the British government (Jeffreys, 2014).…”

Section: Research Context Conceptual Insights and Adequacy Of Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

Making sense of ‘Ireland’, sport and identity: the craft of doing sociology

Liston

Maguire

2020

Sport in Society

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Eric Dunning influenced the development of curricula and research agendas in sociology, history, social science and sports studies, internationally, in the UK and in Ireland. Dunning was also doctoral supervisor to, and academic colleague/mentor and friend of, both authors (at Leicester, Dublin and Chester). Inspired by him, this paper reflects on the craft of sociological research. The case study is the struggle for recognition of 'Ireland' in international athletics and the associated painstaking ongoing archival and mixed methods research work in multiple venues, involving sporting, state and personal papers, interviews and oral history sources. Such a history of the social dynamics of charisma and shame between the so-called 'mother country' (Great Britain) and a restless dominion (Ireland) was by no means structureless or patternless, but ontologically interdependent with life today. Accordingly, we consider several themes: the interplay between theory and evidence, the involvementdetachment balance and exploring knowledge figurations. In line with Dunning (and Elias), the paper adopts an anticipatory motif, that is to say, the work of understanding social relations between the 'British' and 'Irish' 'then' and 'now' is not finished. This work is one step in carrying forth the baton -the stock of intergenerational knowledge -about doing sociology, handed to us in trust by Dunning.

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Section: Research Context Conceptual Insights and Adequacy Of Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

Making sense of ‘Ireland’, sport and identity: the craft of doing sociology

Liston

Maguire

2020

Sport in Society

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“…In the 1930s the IOC and the IAAF adopted a political boundary rule that cemented internal divisions and was the regulatory basis for a bifurcated governance structure in Irish sport. This rule was a confinement of the original 32-county (all-island) Central actors in the production of the BOA's memo were Harold Abrahams (Olympic gold medallist, President of the Amateur Athletic Association/AAA and member of the Achilles Club) and Lord Desborough (a politician opposed to Home Rule in Ireland, hands-on and charismatic BOA chairman (Jeffreys, 2014). This memo asserted that an athletic association, not a country, obtained membership of the international federation and favoured the replacement of the term country with unit.…”

Section: Political Borders In Sportmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some of the intricate details of the treatment of the OCI 1948 entry are made possible here by casting fresh light on known archival material (those of the BOA, AAA, OCI minutes/reports; national/public records in Belfast, Dublin and London) and on current analyses (e.g. Jeffreys, 2014;Hampton, 2008;Hunt, 2015), but also by presenting new insights gleaned from original analysis (e.g. the Brundage Collection).…”

Section: Insert Figure One: International Olympic Sport -A Zone Of Pr...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The ‘Great Game’ and Sport: Identity, Contestation and Irish–British Relations in the Olympic Movement

Liston

Maguire

2020

Journal of War & Culture Studies

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She has published extensively on the nexus of sport and identity, including gender, national identity, and pain and injury. Professor Joseph Maguire is past-President of both the International Sociology of Sport Association (ISSA) and the International Sociological Association Research Committee 27. He has published extensively on sport, culture, and society and has received two major awards: from the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport for Distinguished Service and ISSA.highly visible manifestation of nationalism (Campbell, 2000;Mangan, 2003;Maguire, 2012): a source of unity and division, within and between countries/nation-states and regional units; mobilized or even weaponized (Coates, 2017) in battles for political and cultural supremacy. Indeed, by the 1980s, the sixth President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Lord Killanin, an Irishman who served as Brigade Major in the British Army in World War Two, acknowledged his 'complete defeat in […] attempts to make the spirit of the Games less nationalistic ' (1983: 9). War and sport were thus potent forces in the creation of imagined communities (Hobsbawm, 1990;Mangan, 2003;2003a) in which sportspeople were patriots at play. Indeed, as Mangan has observed (1985), the games ethic underpinned notions of imperialism and military endeavour. Sport was therefore central to twentieth-century questions of identity, diplomacy, and statecraft, and to understanding war with other means.Set in this context, three fundamental questions underpin this case study. Who represented 'Ireland' at the 1948 London Olympics, as competitors and officials, and for what purposes? Who was attracted to or repelled by this representation, and why?And, what does this reveal of international sport as war with other means? These questions were directly connected to political, diplomatic and international relations, whose relevance was important for the trajectory of Irish state formation. The actions of protagonists in our case study demonstrate that Olympic and international sport was, for them, a diplomatic, cultural and symbolic means of projecting a 32-county 'Ireland' on the international stage in the aftermath of World War Two (WWII). Here, we focus on the quest for exciting significance by non-state actors / sportive diplomats, who were the forerunners of a more specialized diplomacy of international sport todaysportcraft (Liston and Maguire, 2020). This was both a 'patriot game' and a struggle for 'soft

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The British Olympic Association: A History

Cited by 2 publications

References 1 publication

Making sense of ‘Ireland’, sport and identity: the craft of doing sociology

Making sense of ‘Ireland’, sport and identity: the craft of doing sociology

The ‘Great Game’ and Sport: Identity, Contestation and Irish–British Relations in the Olympic Movement

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