W hat is“modern sport”？

In his seminal work From Ritual to Record first published in 1978，Allen Guttmann6 has argued that there are seven such structural characteristics.First，modern sport was secular with no religious reasons for participation.Second，it was expected to demonstrate equality：theoretically everyone should have an opportunity to compete，and the conditions of competition should be the same for all contestants.Third，it introduced the idea of specialization：everyone who wanted to could join in folk football，a sport in which there were no sharply defined roles，but the emphasis on achievement in modern sport brought in specialization both within a sport and between sports.Fourth was rationalization，in particular the development of rules that in primitive societies were often considered“divine instructions”—God-given rituals，not to be tampered with by mere humans.In contrast，non-secularmodern sportswere invented with their own written rules.Even more rationalization came via the development of coaching and sports science.Guttmann's fifth feature was bureaucratization.Almost every major modern sport has a national and international organization that developed extensive bureaucracies to establish universal rules for the sport and oversee their implementation.These were not required when there were no written rules.Sixth was quantification，by which modern sports transform every athletic feat into statistics.Following on from quantification is Guttmann's seventh point，themodern emphasis on records.Likemanymodels，Guttmann'swas an ideal-type postulation thatmay never have all its conditions fully satisfied.However，it has stood the test of time，if not in its entirety，then as a basis on which others have built.

3-2　Allen Guttmann

3-3　Modern Sport