780 Ch. 19 • Rapid Industrialization and Its Challenges
gasoline or even steam. Cycling competitions also generated enormous
public interest. Sporting newspapers catered to fans. Competition between
two cycling clubs led to the first Tour de France race in 1903, in which rid
ers covered almost 1,500 miles in nineteen days.
Not only did people watch bicycle races, many rode bicycles themselves,
both for leisure and as a source of transportation. A simple mechanism,
the bicycle nonetheless reflected the technological innovation and mass
production of the Second Industrial Revolution. By the late 1880s, bicy
cles were lighter, more affordable, and more easily repaired or replaced.
Their manufacture became a major industry, with 375,000 produced in
France by 1898 and 3.5 million in 1914.
Both men and women rode bicycles. But some men complained that the
clothes women wore while riding bicycles were unfeminine. Some worried
that female cyclists might compromise the middle-class domestic ideal of
the '‘angel of the house.” Moralists were concerned that the jolts of rough
paths and roads might interfere with childbearing, or even lead to
debauchery by generating physical pleasure. The president of a feminist
congress in 1896, however, toasted the “egalitarian and leveling bicycle.”
It helped free women from the corset, “a new Bastille to be demolished.”
The bicycle may have also changed what some people considered the fem
inine ideal from plumpness to a more svelte line.
Team sports also quickly developed as a leisure activity during the second
half of the nineteenth century. The two most popular team sports in Eu
rope, football (soccer in the United States) and rugby, both began in Eng
land. Rugby, which developed at Cambridge and Oxford Universities in the
1860s, was an upper-class sport. Football had much earlier origins, perhaps
going back to when Vikings and Russians used to “kick the Dane’s head
around”—literally. But football, which also had university origins, evolved
into a plebeian sport, like boxing, which was to English workers what row
ing, cricket, and golf became to the upper classes. Professional football
began in England in 1863; eight years later, there were fifteen clubs playing
for the championship. The new century brought the first major brawl
between supporters of rival teams: a match between the Catholic Celtics
and the Protestant Rangers of Glasgow ended with the stadium burned to
the ground. In 1901, 111,000 spectators watched the English Cup Final.
Baron Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937), a French noble who feared that
the young men of his country were becoming soft, organized the first mod
ern Olympic Games, held in Athens in 1896 in homage to the Greek cre
ators of the Olympiad. An Anglophile, he revered the contemporary image
of hard-riding, athletic upper-class Englishmen playing sports at Eton and
Cambridge and then going on to expand the British Empire.
There was more to the rise of sports and the cult of physical vigor than
simply games and fun. The development of sports culture also reflected the
mood of aggressive nationalism. The popularity of Darwin’s theory of the
evolution of species led to a growing preoccupation with the comparative