Welsh Journals

Athletics: The Lesson of the Empire and Commonwealth Games JOHN DISLEY IT WAS HARDLY surprising to any student of Welsh history to find that the Cardiff Arms Park was poorly filled on the first day of the athletics in the Empire Games. For that first Saturday of the Games saw the resumption of first-class running in Wales after a lapse of well over 100 years. For although Rugby and Football command large crowds and are played by thousands every week-end in the winter, athletics and most other sports in Wales never recovered from that surgical knife that swept and cut out all games and pastimes-the damning attitude of the Non-conformist chapel during the 19th century. Organised physical activity declined rapidly in this time of religious fervour; all the national dances and indigenous games died out. Today Wales has English games as her own and dances that have been con- cocted by guesswork and surmise from old Welsh tunes, the main thread of continuity has been broken and lost during the building of the chapels in the first half of the last century. Even today there is often an instinctive mistrust of the aims and morals of sport and dance to be felt in our smaller Welsh communities. Unlike so many similar small villages in England where the parson was often the leader and organizer of local village sport, the Welsh village minister and his deacons often discouraged all activity which might be supposed to have connections with gambling and pamper to narcissism. At the moment it is education in Welsh schools that is bringing back into Welsh life a knowledge of sport, and is helping to re-adjust the balance of a full-life. It was the schools that packed the terraces on the last three days of the Games, while it was television that brought the adults to the expen- sive seats in the stands. The Glamorgan schools have one of the best organizations for athletics in the whole of Britain and the children had a good idea of what they wanted to see. The parents, inclined to stand back on the