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, united and/or kingdom:
“If a walker is indeed an individualist there is nowhere he can’t go at dawn and not many places he can’t go at noon. But just as it demeans life to live alongside a great river you can no longer swim in or drink from, to be crowded into safer areas and hours takes much of the gloss off walking—one sport you shouldn’t have to reserve a time and a court for.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“How we dwelt in two worlds
the daughters and the mothers
in the kingdom of the sons.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)