Two years ago I wrote a rather miserable blog about supporting a football team that was facing relegation. Dear old Brentford duly went down that year, and have played in the bottom division – Rebranded League Two, Division Four, whatever – for two seasons. These years saw matches against teams we had never played before, like Dagenham and Redbridge, as well as reunions with some old regulars also fallen on hard times, like Luton, Northampton, and Grimsby.

Those two years saw a major revival, though, and in a season that saw other teams – Luton, Bournemouth, Rotherham, and Darlington – burdened with points deductions for financial mistakes, some of the usual pressure was removed. From facing relegation from the League back at Christmas 2007, Brentford exceeded expectations and won the League with room to spare this year. They certainly exceeded the bookies’ expectations: my £5 each way at 16/1 before the season started certainly felt like a good investment after the final whistle at Darlington, my only regret being that I hadn’t risked a little more.

Supporting a lowly team like Brentford always means that the highs, when they come, are extremely high. In my 30-odd years of supporting them, whoever has to keep the honours board up-to-date has not exactly been inundated with work: the real Third Division title in 1991-92, the rebranded Third Division title in 1998-99, and … er, that’s it. Sure, this is better than the experiences of many teams, but it’s not the kind of thing that would keep a supporter of one of the currently natural Premiership teams happy. I try not to fall into the cliché of attributing too many life lessons to what we do in sport, but I’m sure that following a small team is healthier than following a big one: expecting success and assuming that failure can’t happen has never struck me as very helpful way of behaving, as witness this season’s wails from Newcastle that their club is too good to be relegated from the Premiership. And Brentford’s fixture list for next season is littered with some of those recently big teams – Leeds United, Nottingham Forest, Southampton, Norwich City, and Charlton among them – for whom these days must still feel like slumming it. Indeed, the fickle nature of the game was underlined by our opponents in that last match: Luton Town, Wembley regulars in the 1980s, slipped quietly out of the League while Brentford celebrated.

The last game this year was comfortable, as we had already secured the title the week before. There was a line-up with fireworks before kick-off, although 3.00 pm on a May Saturday isn’t the most effective time to light up the sky. After the game, despite the MC’s heartfelt protests, there was a huge pitch invasion, and the awarding of the trophy, complete with a podium on the pitch and Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions’ echoing predictably round the ground. As well as enjoying the moment, the celebrations sparked memories of other promotions: hugging Herman Hreidarsson after we secured promotion in 1999; going to Peterborough with low expectations in 1992 and coming home with a huge grin after a handshake with that year’s hero, Dean Holdsworth – I asked him not to leave the club but he didn’t listen; and drinking my first beer after winning promotion in 1978 (I hope there’s a statute of limitations on this as I was only 13, but I only had a few sips – honest). My brother somehow blagged his way into the dressing room that day and came home with striker Andy McCulloch’s shirt. Memories like this – the kind that never usually get written down – are part of the tradition that lies at the heart of all sports fandom. These key moments form the high points in the narrative of our relationships with our clubs.

I’ve always loved using newspapers for primary research. It’s true that some sports historians over-rely on them, and ignore other types of evidence. It’s also true that we sometimes don’t make as much effort to find out about a historical paper’s affiliations – political and economic – as we do with contemporary papers. This is particularly true of the local press, where we are often just so glad to have some evidence that we sometimes forget to ask some basic contextual questions. However, there’s no denying the allure of fading newsprint and their stories of old sport.

My research has been taking me into old papers a lot recently. I’m working on a history of the Olympic Games in Britain, and of the various events that were called ‘Olympic’ – or variants such as Olympian and Olympick – that took place before the International Olympic Committee established itself in 1894. Newspapers are crucial here, especially local newspapers for the various places that hosted these events, such as Liverpool, Much Wenlock, and Morpeth. While some papers are now available online in full texts pdfs back to the late eighteenth century, many remain accessible only in hard copy or microfilm in local libraries or at Colindale in the British Library’s Newspaper Library.

I spent quite a bit of time at Colindale when I was doing my PhD in the late 1980s, and going back there recently was a real pleasure. The place has hardly changed: institutional art deco architecture, airless and lightless microfilm rooms that leave me feeling like a nocturnal creature, and 1930s reading desks with their frames for holding the bound volumes. The real joy is in handling the newspapers in hard copy, not on microfilm, and turning the pages much as the original audiences would have done. The local slants on sporting events are always good value: the Hampshire newspaper that reported on the 1948 Olympic torch relay with a focus on a runner from Eastleigh, for example, or the Northumberland newspaper of the same year that compares – favourably, it must be said – the attendance at the wrestling at the Morpeth Olympic Games with the crowds in London for same sport in the Olympic Games. The heartbreaking way in which the pages flake in every reader’s hands as they are turned convinces us all that digitisation is the answer, but something will be lost when the switch happens and Colindale closes.

I’ve been using newspapers in teaching this week, too, and it’s been good to see students getting used to the conventions of the press from the last two centuries. They were particularly struck by the way in which more attention was paid in late eighteenth century cricket reports to gambling than to who the players were, and by the huge sums of money involved – like the 1000 guineas in a 1799 match between Surrey and eleven of England. They were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of detail in late Victorian local newspapers, with their news of athletics and swimming clubs’ annual events running into columns of close-set broadsheet pages. And they were drawn – as so many sports historians are – to looking at the football scores and league tables to laugh at how the mighty have fallen or how the minnows have arisen. A 1989 newspaper, for example, which showed Chelsea in the Second Division, and Norwich and Millwall in the top five of the League, seemed almost as unbelievable as the eighteenth century cricketers with more money than sense. Elvis Costello may have claimed that ‘yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper’: but it was a great feeling to pass on a critical respect for the press as a primary source to the next generation.

Last week, I went to Southampton City Art Gallery for opening of A Century of Olympic Posters, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s touring exhibition. I caught it last year at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, since when it has been Ironbridge in Shropshire, close to the historical home of the modern Olympic Games at Much Wenlock, and to Beijing. The preview evening was well-presented, with the organisers clearly recognising the opportunity for art/sport crossovers that such exhibitions can foster: as well as being able to see the exhibition, we were entertained by displays by local boxing and trampolining clubs, a rare chance for people to make a lot of noise and jump around in the usually hushed atmosphere of an art gallery.

The items in this excellent exhibition range from an 1851 advertisement for Robert Dover’s Olympick Games at Chipping Campden to posters from the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Most of the IOC’s Olympic Games are represented, including some of the Winter Olympics, with a thematic arrangement working alongside the more obvious chronological one. Apart from wishing that I had some of the posters for myself, three things struck me about the collection.

First, there is the old dilemma of presenting what is ultimately advertising material in an art gallery. The old distinctions between fine art and commercial art have probably been irrelevant since at least Toulouse-Lautrec. Even so it can still be odd to walk, as I did at Southampton, past a painting by James Tissot and a sculpture by Antony Gormley and into a quiet space devoted to bits of paper that were designed to be glued to billboards. The reverence that we are supposed to feel in art galleries clashes with the memories that the posters evoke. Some of them are great pieces of commercial art, and established artists including Roy Lichtenstein (LA 1984) and David Hockney (Munich 1972 and LA 1984) do for the Olympics what Lautrec did for Parisian nightclubs. Others, however, have little artistic merit – sorry, Athens 2004, but your piece here looked far too much like a standard Greek holiday poster. Either way, there is still something incongruous about looking at adverts that are framed and labelled as pieces of art.

My second impression was about just how unolympic the early posters were. The exhibition serves as a reminder that certain aspects of the Olympic Games that we now take for granted – the five ring logo, for example, and other aspects of the brand – simply didn’t exist in the competition’s early years. The fencing poster for the 1900 Paris Olympics makes no reference to the Olympic Games, for example, while the rings do not feature on any of the posters here until Los Angeles 1932, despite being used as early as Antwerp 1920. The exhibition is thus a great place to visit for anyone wanting an object lesson in the invention of tradition, or a reminder of how organisations are always evolving.

Finally, I was impressed that the exhibition’s curators had included some oppositional and alternative Olympic posters. The anti-Beijing 2008 designs, with the Olympic rings rendered in barbed wire or as the wheels of tanks, are not included, but a powerful Mexican poster from 1968 stands for the many anti-Olympic campaigns. In this, the campaigners for freedom of speech drew a man with his lips sealed with the Olympic rings. A Terrence Higgins Trust poster from the 1980s renders the rings as a collection of five coloured condoms. A colourful poster for the 1936 Workers’ Olympiad in Barcelona shows one of the forms that opposition to the Berlin Olympics took. The fact that the Barcelona poster includes a representation of a black competitor, something the official posters do not manage until 1960, suggests another interesting avenue for analysis.

The posters thus serve as a visual record of a changing aesthetics in the Olympic movement, and as views of what the Olympics – and their forerunners – were like at different moments in their history. This exhibition is not overly corporate, and is happy to make uncomfortable comparisons and contrasts. It also confirms the importance of visual artefacts as primary sources for the sports historian.

Sports history, in line with many other types of history, is currently experiencing a strong ‘visual turn’, with historians increasingly using visual sources as well as verbal ones. This is taking many forms, with everything from advertising and packaging through to fine art and architectural drawings being used to supplement and complement the more traditional documents that we use. I’ve had an interest in visual sources for a long time, having supervised a PhD on propaganda posters, and I’m doing two projects at the moment that rely heavily on visuals. The first is based on knitting patterns, those ephemeral glossy leaflets that carry all sorts of information about class, gender, and family structures in their stilted photographs. The second is for a book on the Olympic Games for English Heritage’s Played in Britain series, where visuals are going to tell a lot of the story.

I’ve also been using visuals in class, with my second year sports history students looking at different artistic representations of sport as a way onto what sport looked like in different cultures. I chose the illustrations for the different types of sport and play that they show. Pieter Breugel’s Children’s Games of 1560 is a good one for getting a sense of spontaneity in play, or people using their landscape and the townscape rather than anything purpose-built, and of a play culture that is free from adult observation or any other external social control. William Hogarth’s The Cockpit of 1759 took us into a different kind of sports culture, one based on nature but taking place in a purpose-built space, and with all sorts of people – the trainer, the bookmaker, and aristocrat, the landlord – having a say in the sport’s progress. Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte of 1886 provided an insight to a calmer recreational culture, with the rowers and the angler providing the only real action for the bourgeois promenaders on their weekend stroll. Finally, L.S. Lowry’s Going to the Match, a naïve rendition of Burnden Park on match day, took us into modern organised football in its industrial heartlands.

This was a challenging and rewarding seminar. So much of the methodology that sport studies and management courses involve is scientific and empirical in approach, with an emphasis on things being provable or not: the ball is in, or the ball is out; the intervention makes the athlete perform better, or it doesn’t. Using paintings and engravings, where the creator’s intentions in depicting sport can’t be exactly recovered, where there is a representation of a truth but no pretence at telling the truth, and where so much depends on subjective judgements, is quite a leap.

The subjective judgements involved for the students were at least threefold. First, some students have a mistrust of using art, based on their scientific preferences. Second, there is the aesthetic judgement of whether or not they liked the picture. Some people found that static nature of Seurat’s painting simply boring, for example. Third, there is the ideological reaction to what the picture shows, which came over strongly in relation to Hogarth’s engraving of a cockfight: most people, understandably, found it cruel and degrading. Everyone got beyond these obstacles, though, and we had a fruitful and constructive discussion about each picture’s context and content, and about how what the artists didn’t show – the lack of policemen in Going to the Match, for example – could tell us as much as what they did show.

Fine art, advertisements, photographs – if we ignore the visual then we deliberately miss out so many potential primary sources, and we refuse to engage with what sport in the past looked like. However posed, however contrived, or however idealised these representations might be, they have just as much to tell us as minute books, newspapers, and other documentary sources.

Like many other people, my New Year resolution was to get fitter. After a few injuries, and with the pounds beginning to creep on as my fortieth birthday recedes ever further, it felt like a good time to get more active. Reading Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running has also been an inspiration. His descriptions of how running and writing balance each other in his life, and his honest acceptance of the gradual slowing down that comes with age, is better than any motivational sloganeering you can get from more mainstream books about staying active. So I joined the local gym here in Winchester, and so far it’s going nicely. I have been a member of the same gym before, on and off since 1993, although I haven’t been for a few years now.

A local authority gym in a pretty ordinary leisure centre might not seem a promising subject for a historian, but I think too much when I’m on the treadmill and there is a lot of material there.

First off, there is a personal history. I can trace some large parts of the past 15 years of my life through remembering about my gym membership – or its lapses – and what I was doing there. I can link it to training for certain events, like a half marathon I ran in 1995, and I can link it to rehabilitation after a couple of operations. I also remember going a lot during the final stages of writing my first book. I can link my lapses to the times when our children were born, and leisure time – however worthily spent – just dried up. The networks of people I have known at the gym have changed in line with changes in my life. When I worked at the local university, I used to see some of my students there, but now that I’ve moved to a university in another town and they have graduated and moved on, I don’t have that link. Now I know lots of people through our children’s school networks. Then there’s the way that I’ve slowed down as I’ve got older – back to Murakami again. Things that seemed easy years ago now take far more effort. The trade off, though, is that my sense of achievement has increased, especially as now, just one month into my current membership, I can already feel the benefits of exercise. I’m not trying to get all Nick Hornby about it: a council-run gym can hardly inspire the same emotional responses as other sporting allegiances. However, I can easily relate important phase of my life to membership and its lapses, and to what I did when I was here.

Just as its place in an autobiography might be overlooked, so the gym’s place in local history is easy to see as marginal. The building itself is early 1990s post-modern lite, a pretty characterless functional space with a few pastel touches. In a city like Winchester, where anything built since the English Revolution is seen as modern, it’s not the kind of building to excite historians. The most notable thing about it is that it replaced an older swimming pool that burnt down. Inside, the gym is placeless – I could be in any gym anywhere. However, coming back after a few years out I’ve been struck by some physical changes. The gym has grown, colonising rooms that used to be used for functions and group classes. The number of television screens has increased from one to six, all playing different channels that users can listen in to on their earphones through the jacks on every exercise machine. A hits-based radio station fills in the gaps between the machine noises and the grunts and groans. The machines themselves – treadmills, bikes, rowers, cross trainers – have become more advanced, able to tell users more about their bodies and their regimes. The type of people using the gym has remained pretty static – an interesting mix of ages, abilities, and sexes, with a smattering of poseurs – while their numbers have increased. More people have personal trainers now than they did when I first joined. In all, the compare and contrast picture I get when I look back from today to my first membership in 1993 is one of an increasing interest in exercise and well-being, as witness the gym’s physical expansion, along with an increasing personalisation of the exercise experience, as people with personal earphones or personal trainers perform to improve the personal data on their machine’s display.

I’m not criticising this: I’m part of it, after all. While I feel some smugness that I walk to the gym and don’t rely on a car, I’m still someone who is choosing to run on a machine rather than make the more natural and less cluttered act of cross-country running, and someone who likes the globalised experience of a sauna at the end of a session. What I am doing is trying to stress that these everyday bits of contemporary life have a history, a history that is personal, social, economic, scientific, cultural, and political. Never take the easy option of ignoring the recent in history: it can be just as telling about continuity and change, and about communities, as the older stuff.

Now, what was my PB for 5km with a 2.5 incline on the treadmill again? Pass me a heart monitor, someone, I’ve got some personal data to upload.

I found a gem in a second-hand bookshop in Beverley, East Yorkshire, last week. It was a complete set of four-volume Encyclopaedia of Sport and Games, edited by the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire and published in London in 1911. I’ve done a fair amount of work on late Victorian and Edwardian sporting literature in the past, and it was a pleasure to get this set. Between them, the four volumes contain hundreds of entries on the whole of the Edwardian sporting world.

It is sometimes tempting to expect reference books like this to be objective as well as authoritative, but dealing with historical sources alerts us to the subjectivities in all writing. These texts are certainly authoritative. They cover, in meticulous detail, everything from bowling techniques in cricket to advice on how to bait a hook to catch a trout. Alongside this authority, the subjectivities – the features that place it in its time and in the culture of its authors – come through in many ways. First, there is the subject matter itself, which shows up how ‘sport’ meant an awful lot more than just team games. While the first volume goes somewhat tamely from ‘A to Cricket’, things hot up with Volume 2, ‘Crocodile to Hound-Breeding’. Volume 3 keeps up the pace from ‘Hunting to Racing’, with the equally exotic Volume 4 running from ‘Rackets to Zebras’. This isn’t simply a set for the country sports brigade, but also for big game hunters – or, at least, those who liked to read about shooting wild boar in Europe, elephants in Africa, and grizzly bears in north America. As such, the books serve as a great reminder of how relative the word ‘sport’ is.

Beyond the subject headings, the assumptions and subjectivities of the authors come through in the text itself. Class-based assumptions run through the sniffy discussion of Northern Rugby Union and professional football. Women are left on the sidelines. Cars and motorboats, the preserve of the richest, are coming into sport alongside horses and boats. Royals and aristocrats from various nations are shown exploring the world’s wilder zones and killing its wilder animals, with indigenous people there simply as servants to help the white men do the shooting. Information about expanding railways in Africa and north America is there for people to plan their trips, an interesting piece of evidence about how the globalisation of sport has an imperial history based around travel, exploration, and hunting. Any belief in the objectivity of the encyclopaedia as a form is made irrelevant in the face of such social and cultural positioning.

Indeed, the frequent use of first person narratives to explain points makes some of the entries read like travelogues. My favourite here is the section on African elephants, written by the famous soldier and explorer Frederick Selous, large parts of which are dedicated to the ‘narrative of our pursuit’ of elephants with a Hottentot hunter and a team of ‘Kaffirs’ in Matabeleland. This kind of writing, full of exciting details about the hunt, and observations about the behaviour of both the animals and his companions, would never make it into an encyclopaedia today, but it fits perfectly here. The first person voices bring with them a sense of expertise and experience which readers would have found reassuring, and which give us a real sense of what these events were like.

It is important to stress that this is all useful. To criticise a historical source for using a writing style that we no longer consider appropriate, or to be written from a perspective which we do not share, would be ludicrous. Instead, you need to recognise the ideologies and assumptions that underpin the text, and work with them. Think about the language that the authors use, and how that positions them. Think about what they leave out of texts as well as what they put in. Think about how contemporary audiences would have received them. Never dismiss an old reference book just because its information and its attitudes are out of date: instead, use it as way into the sport and the society of the time from which it comes.

Family history has come a long way over the last few years. The BBC television show Who Do You Think You Are? is the most obvious manifestation of a trend that has seen family history move away from being the preserve of old families (who call it genealogy) and into the domain of all classes. It has become a vital adjunct of community history, and we can see it as a logical stage in the development of history from below. Through family history, we can make direct personal connections between ourselves and the past, and we can look at how identifiable individuals were affected by industrialisation, urbanisation, infant mortality, immigration, and so many of the other big themes of social and economic history. I’ve been dipping my toes in my own family history recently, and it’s fascinating to see how, even within the last six generations, I can use my ancestors as ways into such diverse strands of history as agricultural labouring, the workhouse, migration to the cities, warfare, policing, the beer trade (and, not quite coincidentally, the Salvation Army), and the London docks. Family history gives us diversity and depth, and helps us as individuals to see where we have come from.

I’ve been reflecting on how this can help sports history, and can see two clear ways.

First off, family history is a great way of getting to grips with sports history when you are first starting out on it. Starting off with elderly relatives who are still alive, you can find out a lot about what sport was like at given moments in the past; and through their memories, you may be able to pick up on what sport was like for their parents and even grandparents. You may pick up on strong family traditions linked to particular sports or clubs, or find out about someone competing at a high level before modern sporting celebrity cultures. You are also likely to come across artefacts and primary sources, like medals, photographs, scrapbooks and press cuttings. This can immediately personalise sports history. Rather than dealing in abstracts, your grandparents’ experiences can give you an understanding of how sport inter-related with the communities in which it was played. In my case, talking to my grandfathers – both now gone – gave me all sorts of insights about playing and watching sport in east and south London in the 1920s that I could never have got from books. Their memories took me into schools, friendship groups, local clubs, and workplaces; and, in the case of one grandfather, how the offer of a professional contract from a football club was relatively easy to turn down because the game seemed very risky compared with learning a trade. Not only did these anecdotes tell me more about my own family history: they shed light on sport’s social, economic, and cultural past.

Second, the boom in family history has given sports historians greater access to sources that can tell us not just about our families, but about the real people involved in the big trends in sport. The best example is the census. Thanks to the National Archives’ co-operation with Ancestry.co.uk, anyone can now search online the original census accounts that give house-by-house lists of families at ten year intervals between 1841 and 1901. (The current rule is that no personal information is made available until a century after the census, so the 1911 documents will be public in 2012). These documents contain occasional errors, such as slight misspellings of names; but they are absolutely priceless for giving us snapshots of domestic life, family structures, migration, and work. For sports historians, these sources can take us into the biographies of people who made a living from sport, or who were prominent as amateurs. Take a look at these three individuals to see what I mean, where all the information has come straight from the census accounts.

William Penney Brookes, the founder of the Much Wenlock Olympian Games and thus one of the key people in the history of the modern Olympic movement. In 1861, eleven years after he had started the Olympian Games, we see him living very comfortably in Much Wenlock. He lists his ‘rank or profession’ as ‘Magistrate, surgeon, apothecary’, and is living with his mother, his wife, three daughters, two apprentices, two house servants, and a groom. Here is the Victorian rational recreation promoter, a man interested in sport because of his social conscience. He is relatively wealthy, hard working, well-connected locally, and with some spare time to devote to organising sport.

Now look at Lottie Dod in 1891. Aged 19, she is reigning Wimbledon champion. She is living with her widowed mother who lives ‘on her own means’, and with her two brothers and a kitchenmaid. Lottie doesn’t have an occupation. Her neighbours include a teacher and a landscape artist. Here is the Victorian amateur woman, able to find the time to play through inherited money, and a classic part of the culture from which lawn tennis sprung.

Finally, jump to 1901 and look at Billy Meredith, already a prominent footballer playing for Manchester City. He is living in South Manchester, and his trade is given as professional footballer. He is living as a boarder in the home of James Hewitt, a hoistman in a warehouse. His neighbours include a gas engine pattern maker, an iron moulder, and a railway plate maker. Here is the lowly professional of Edwardian Britain, making a living from his game, but nothing like a fortune, and living with the working class people who made up the sport’s following.

It is easy to sniff at family history: but these kind of approaches, which can both personalise your own way into sport and give us greater detail on prominent people in sport’s past, can only benefit the discipline. They can make it more accessible and more real, and give us a flavour of how people in the past fitted their games into their everyday lives.

I've just finished reading Far From the Sodding Crowd, the iconoclastic guidebook to 'uncommonly British days out' by Robin Halstead, Jason Hazeley, Alex Morris and Joel Morris. It's the sequel to their 2005 Bollocks to Alton Towers (try asking for that in a loud voice at your local library). Unsurprisingly for a guidebook written by the people behind spoof local newspaper The Framley Examiner, it's a humorous but also poignant guide to some of the more eccentric sites that tourists can visit. It discusses the joys of visiting such places as Whipsnade Tree Cathedral and the Bubblecar Museum in Lincolnshire, and argues convincingly that these have far more to offer than increasingly standardised tourist visits to theme parks and the like. The authors cover two sport sites, one in each book: the completely unofficial Beckham Trail run by the London Borough of Waltham Forest ; and, in the second book, the Partick Thistle stadium tour, which they see as an antidote to the corporate gloss and high prices of similar events available at a Premiership ground near you.

There are many ways in which we can celebrate the places at which sport happened in the past. Stadium tours, halls of fame, and museums are the obvious ways, and there are many excellent examples of all of these. My current favourite is the River and Rowing Museum at Henley-on-Thames, which successfully combines the related stories of the river as a place for sport and leisure and a place for commerce and industry. But we can also get more local, and recognise that an awful lot of the events that have made up the history of sport have happened in rather ordinary places. Not every site is a field of dreams - or, indeed, even a field. Yet this doesn't mean that they are not worth visiting. You won't necessarily get the reception and information that you would in a museum, but you can - with some imagination and an eye for landscapes and details - get a sense of history. In the spirit of Far From the Sodding Crowd, and in tribute to its authors' ability to make museums dedicated to gas, salt, and paperweights sound fascinating, here are a few suggestions of my own for off the beaten track sports history days out. These are not in any order, and are just a few of the 'uncommonly British' ways that you could get in touch with the past of sport in an ordinary and inexpensive way.

1. Walk - or run - part (or why not all?) of a historic marathon route. The London Olympic route from 1908 is a good one, as it's from here that the 26 miles and 385 yard distance comes from. The route goes from Windsor Castle to the BBC Media Village at White City in Shepherd's Bush. Use the route description form the Official Report as your guide, and relive the drama of Pietri, Hayes, Hefferon and Longboat through Slough, Ruislip, Harlesden, and Wormwood Scrubs. Falling over and being helped up by a stweard is optional. The BBC Media Village is built on the site of the stadium, and they've put in a plaque on the wall and a marker on the ground to show where the finishing line was.

2. Swim in an interwar open air pool. Maybe September isn't the best time to be suggesting this (although some heated ones are open all year, like the one at Hampton), but this is a great way into the living recreational lives of communities, and for those of us who swim only indoors now, a reminder of what it was like in the past.

3. Discover an old racecourse. There are plenty around, and they always show up on Ordnance Survey maps. In many cases, some evidence of the track survives, and you can get a sense of the place's scale: Southampton Common is good for this. At some, like Stockbridge in Hampshire, buildings have survived, put to other uses. In some cases, you'll wonder why people chose such out of the way and inaccessible places to race and bet: my favourite for this is the one on top of Hergest Ridge on the Herefordshire/Powys border. Use maps and local guidebooks to get a sense of how these courses related to the towns and villages that they served.

4. Visit a pub in which sports history was made. Wray Vamplew and Tony Collins' Mud, Sweat and Beers is a wonderful exploration of the historical links between pubs and sport, and there are hundreds of pubs around the country that have a sporting past. In some cases, the pubs were the focus for sport, such as The Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden (boxing), or The Fighting Cocks in Dartford (you can work out the sporting connection here for yourself). Plenty of sports clubs and governing bodies have historic links with pubs that are still open, so try out The Bat and Ball Inn at Clanfield in Hampshire for the Hambledon cricket experience, or The George in Huddersfield for rugby league heritage.

Let me know your suggestions.

It was always obvious that the 1908 London Olympics were going to loom large in the British media’s coverage of Beijing, on the simple grounds that everyone loves a centenary. I was expecting to see most of this in the coverage of the marathon, as the distance is based on the Windsor to White City route of 1908: and, sure enough, three minutes into the men’s race we heard about Pietri being helped over the line. What I wasn’t expecting was the British team’s performance to be so good, and to hear 1908 being cited not just as a historical curiosity, but as the benchmark for the British medal tally. As everyone now knows, with the numbers ’19-13-15’ becoming a mantra, Beijing was Britain’s best performance since London 1908.

This benchmark needs bit of deconstruction. First off, medal tables are not the objective statements of achievement that they can seem to be at first. There are plenty of different ways of counting medals. Without wishing to restart the Battle of Shepherd’s Bush, it’s clear that the USA’s way of counting all medals puts them at the top of the Beijing table with 110 to China’s 100, while the British method of giving points for golds, silvers, and bronzes puts the USA in second place, behind China. Second, it’s important to remember that medals weren’t awarded at the Olympic Games until St Louis in 1904, so any historical accounts that claim anyone won gold, silver, or bronze in 1896 and 1900 is being anachronistic (and don’t get me started on that again). Third, there was no meaningful notion of standardised national teams in all competitions at the Olympics until 1908, and even then there were plenty of exceptions. Fourth, there has never been a standard way of rewarding third place across all sports, as seen at Beijing when we compare the boxing, where both beaten semi-finalists get a bronze medal each, and the fencing, where the beaten semi-finalists have to fight again for the third place. Finally, the geopolitical make-up of countries has changed over time: you only have to think about the Cold War debates over who or what ‘Germany’, ‘Korea’, and ‘China’ represented, or to look at the division of the supreme Indian hockey team of 1936 into separate Indian and Pakistani teams in 1948, to see the issue here.

With these caveats in place, let’s take a look at just what Great Britain’s medal haul in 1908 involved. Great Britain (which, picking up on the last point above, included all of Ireland) won 56 golds, 51 silvers, and 39 bronzes. Taken out of context and placed alongside subsequent dominant countries, this is awesome, and is not surpassed until the 1980s boycotts by the USSR’s 80 golds in 1980, and the USA’s 83 in 1984. China’s 51 this year seem almost modest by comparison. As ever, though, context is everything: and without wishing to demean the many high quality performances of 1908, we need to dig beneath the simple table. Only 22 countries were represented in 1908; and when we break that down further into team sizes, the British performance seems less amazing. Great Britain’s team accounted for 707 of the 2,029 competitors. The next largest team was France, with 208; and three countries – Argentina, Iceland, and Switzerland – had single competitors. The next issue is that the British provided the only entrants, or the vast majority of entrants, in some events. The most famous example is the 400 metres on the track, where Wyndham Halswelle had a walkover following an American disqualification and walkout. Less famously, racquets was a purely British affair, while 41 of the 57 archers were British, as were 32 of the 42 boxers, 13 of the 14 motorboat racers, and 40 of the 64 sailors. Finally, some team sports still worked on club rather than national lines, which blurs the table still further. The five teams in the tug of war, for example, included three British police force teams; the three teams in the polo tournament were Ireland (a rare official use of the name), Hurlingham, and Roehampton; while the British rugby union team that lost 32-3 to Australia in the tournament's only match was Cornwall’s county team. And I’ve not event mentioned the obvious home advantage and the, shall we say, one-eyed refereeing that went on from the all-British officials.

I’m not trying to demean the experience of 1908. The Olympic Games then were new and evolving, and many of our certainties about them simply didn’t exist then. Nor am I trying to belittle the British successes in Beijing by saying that the 1908 benchmark was massively inflated. Indeed, the opposite is true: Olympic success is now far harder than it was then. What I’m aiming for is a bit less anachronism and a bit more research before we use past medal tables as evidence of any meaningful comparisons.

Listen to my podcast on Olympic history.

A month in the life of a sports historian

When I meet new people and they ask what I do for a living, the reply ‘I’m a sports historian’ usually elicits one of two responses, even when I qualify the title by explaining that I’m a university lecturer. Some people look askance, wondering how on earth what sounds like a trivial subject gets taught at universities. Others are envious, and say that it sounds like the best job in the world, and then expect me to reel off all the winners of the Grand National in sequence, or ask me to recite the batting averages of post-war British test cricketers. The truth – as every liberal historian will tell you – is somewhere between the two. Yes, it’s interesting; yes, sports history does deserve to get taught; and no, I’m afraid I’d have to look that stuff up. However, I thought I’d devote for this month’s entry to the ‘log’ element of weblog, and provide an overview of what I’ve been up to.

My teaching and marking finished in June, and July started with a PhD examination. I was external examiner on a PhD thesis on the history of sports coaching. The project was outstanding, and the viva – the oral exam by which the student convinces the examiners that the work is original and that he’s got more to offer – was a pleasure. The sign of a good PhD is when the examiners learn something new from it, when the student has gone beyond any published literature and offered up something that makes us want to ask loads of new questions. In this case, the project touched on such diverse areas as local and community history, occupational cultures, scientific and medical knowledge, and the professional/amateur debate; and the student even demonstrated the trudgeon, a now disused swimming stroke. Here was cutting edge sports history, where the established academics – the supervisors, the other examiners, and me – were able to bring on new talent and help in its development.

I’ve had two conferences in July. First up was the Centre for Contemporary British History’s annual conference in London, which this year was dedicated to the Olympic Games. Using this year’s centenary of London’s first Olympic Games as the peg, the conference looked at 1908, 1948, and plans for 2012 from many different angles. I gave a paper on the 1908 Olympic Marathon route from Windsor Castle to White City, part of my work in progress on British Olympic history. I looked at the notion of ‘associative significance’, and how contextual historical research can help us to understand the extraordinary things that have happened in ordinary places. The conference brought together academic and non-academic historians, professional authors, planners, journalists, and politicians, and proved a great focus for thinking about how history can inform our understanding of the present and thus our decisions about the future. History and Policy’s sponsorship of the round table session underlined these links. My second conference couldn’t have been more different. In The Loop: knitting past, present and future at the University of Southampton’s Winchester School of Art (WSA) was held to launch the WSA Library’s Knitting Reference Collection. It brought together academics from many different fields, along with knitters, collectors, librarians, and archivists. I gave a paper on knitting patterns as historical documents, using the Reference Collection’s numerous patterns for sports clothing as my sample. Sweaters for cricket, tennis, and golf; swimming costumes; scarves and hats in club colours: these sources provide a wonderful snapshot of everyday life from the past. I’ll write about them in more detail later this year. Although the conference had a different focus from the Olympic one, with sport as a tiny theme, it brought up some similar themes about how the past and its artefacts need to be collected and conserved for historical research.

My third big commitment brought everything home. My family and I went to Much Wenlock in Shropshire to watch the Olympian Games. Never mind Beijing: here was a historical event that, through revival and a degree of reinvention, continues to fulfil its founder’s aim of giving a wide-ranging sporting experience to the people of the region. We watched athletics, archery, five-a-side football, and tennis. There was nothing phoney or faux about it: here was a community sports event that attracted people from across the Midlands (clubs represented in the athletics, for example, included Birchfield Harriers and Coventry Godiva) exactly as the original, pre-Coubertin series of Olympian Games had from the 1850s. The veteran bicycle event was the only thing that was overtly historical. Here was living history, a sports event that maintained a link with the past without attempting to weigh it down with the baggage of too much heritage.

These are the highlights. I did a range of other things involving sports history during the month, including some writing, and some discussions about future projects. I also went to my students’ graduation, and saw the fruits of the teaching coming to bear. Sports history, like any kind of history, is about this constant interplay between what happened then, what’s happening now, and what might happen next; and what I did in July showed this relationship up in all sorts of ways.