šta čitate?

In the 1920s and 1930s hundreds of thousands of working-class men and women across Europe watched and participated in sport. International competitions were organised with the express intention of undermining national rivalries. Women took place in athletic contests free from the shackles of discrimination. In Frankfurt, Vienna and Antwerp, tens of thousands gathered for huge sporting festivals that could attract more spectators and athletes than the Olympic Games. But these activities were not organised by commercial entrepreneurs or moralistic educationalists. This was a sporting culture based on socialism and the labour movement that sought to provide an alternative to the nationalism, male chauvinism and hyper-competition of the commercial and amateur models of sport.
This explains the hostility of much of the socialist movement to the emergence of mass spectator sport. This opposition was also based on internationalist revulsion at the nationalism of modern sport, which produced ‘cannon fodder for imperialist wars’ in Maxim Gorky’s words. And football, boxing and similar spectator sports were organised on an openly capitalist basis, and offered a commercialised alter- native to those sports provided by organisations such as the SPD.