Sport In The United Kingdom
The United Kingdom has given birth to a range of major international sports including: association football, rugby (union and league), cricket, golf, tennis, badminton, squash, rounders, hockey, boxing, snooker, billiards and curling. It has also played a key role in the development of sports such as sailing and Formula One.
This has meant that in the infancy of many sports, Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland formed among the earliest separate governing bodies, national teams and domestic league competitions. After 1922 some sports formed separate bodies for Northern Ireland though many continue to be organised on an all-Ireland basis.
As a result, notably in certain teams sports such as association football and Rugby, but also in the multi-sport Commonwealth Games, international sporting events are contested not by a team representing the United Kingdom, but by teams representing the separate "home nations". At Olympic level, however, the United Kingdom is represented by a single national organising committee the British Olympic Association, and competes as Great Britain and Northern Ireland (although some Northern Ireland athletes are eligible for, and compete on behalf of, Ireland).
For more information on most sports you may wish, therefore, to consider reading the Sport in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland or Ireland articles.
Major individual sports include athletics, golf, motorsport, and horseracing. Tennis is the highest profile sport for the two weeks of the Wimbledon Championships, but otherwise struggles to hold its own in the country of its birth. Many other sports are also played and followed to a lesser degree. There is much debate over which sport has the most active participants with swimming, athletics, cycling all found to have wider active participation than association football in the 2010 Sport England Active People survey.
Read more about Sport In The United Kingdom: Administration and Funding, Popularity, Sports Media, Major Sports Facilities, Student Sport, School Sport
Famous quotes containing the words sport in the, sport, united and/or kingdom:
“Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“What sport shall we devise here in this garden
To drive away the heavy thought of care?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“... what a family is without a steward, a ship without a pilot, a flock without a shepherd, a body without a head, the same, I think, is a kingdom without the health and safety of a good monarch.”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)