Vanessa Heggie begins her fascinating history of British sports medicine since the late nineteenth century with the posthumous revelation in 1980 that the Polish-born Olympian Stella Walsh (Stanisława Walasiewiczówna), who had won gold and silver medals in the 100 metres in the 1930s, ‘was not a normal athlete from a femininity standpoint’. This sensational news tapped into contemporary anxieties about doping, steroid use and sexually ambiguous female competitors. In the ensuing controversy about Walsh’s ‘gender fraud’ the International Olympics Committee rejected calls to rescind her medals because at the time she genuinely believed herself to be a woman. For Heggie this episode evokes the ‘fundamental question’ of sports medicine in the twentieth century, namely ‘defining normality for the athlete’ (pp. 1–2).
There are recent studies of topics such as drugs in sport, but the general history of British sports medicine has been neglected. This deeply researched, nuanced account is much more than a narrow history of the rise of sports medicine from the founding of the British Association of Sport and Exercise Medicine in 1952 until its recognition as a formal speciality in the early twenty-first century. Heggie takes the story back to a loose network of practitioners and sites such as the little known ‘Footballers’ Hospital’ in Manchester, which opened in the late Victorian period, and she demonstrates that medical research informed training manuals from the early twentieth century. Heggie highlights the contribution of British scientists and doctors in this area and she questions the myth of British backwardness in contrast with Germany or the USA, where the history of sports medicine has received much greater attention.
Taking established accounts of the social construction of health and disease as her starting point, Heggie highlights the complexity of categories such as normality or fitness. In the early twentieth century the athletic body, which was predominantly young, white and male, was perceived to be little different from that of a ‘normal’ healthy citizen, but a hundred years later elite athletes stood apart. Heggie traces how these two categories were gradually separated, a process which took off between the 1930s and the 1950s against the background of growing international tension and world war. She argues that it was only when the athlete became supernormal or abnormal that sports medicine became a distinctive area of expertise. Athletes functioned as inspirational icons or exemplars of fitness, but there is little agreement on the definition of fitness and how it could be measured. Heggie rightly points out that the more important question is ‘fit for what’? (p. 19). Answers ranging from normal life, war or elite competition provide insight into shifting conceptions of the athletic body. Contemporary athletes are frequently unhealthy and may even be threatened by premature mortality. Heggie argues that the celebration of athletic fitness as a model for the general public provides an ethical challenge for sports medicine with important implications for social and public health policy.
This timely book, published a year before the London Olympics, provides important new insights into the construction of the athletic body and the role of medical practitioners with regard to treatment, policing and enhancement in sporting competitions. By highlighting the ‘abnormality’ of the contemporary athlete, whose requirements for facilities and medical treatment are considerably removed from those of ordinary citizens, Heggie’s study adds weight to critical voices who question the ‘legacy’ claims of longer-term health benefits of the Olympics for the local community in East London.
