[HN Gopher] The strange 19th-Century sport that was cooler than ...
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       The strange 19th-Century sport that was cooler than football
        
       Author : pseudolus
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2021-08-01 10:41 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
        
       | cafard wrote:
       | It's still an Olympic event. I used to know a race walker in the
       | DC area, but I don't know where he found events to compete in. I
       | think he was the one who told me that race walking develops the
       | muscles more evenly than running does. (I can't remember exactly
       | how he put it.)
        
         | WaitWaitWha wrote:
         | It is still practiced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racewalking
         | 
         | Interestingly the mentioned wobble is used by today's racers.
         | Destroys their hips.
        
       | legerdemain wrote:
       | Check out the bematists of ancient Greece![1]
       | 
       | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bematist
        
       | bb101 wrote:
       | "On the fifth day, the leading horse - a black mare known as
       | Betsy Baker - stopped responding to the whip, and retired for two
       | hours. She was apparently exhausted, and nothing could induce her
       | to continue except champagne." -- The past truly is a foreign
       | country.
        
       | mprovost wrote:
       | The article has a photo of the Royal Agricultural Hall in London
       | where they used to hold races. It's now called the Business
       | Design Centre and this year has been converted into a mass
       | vaccination centre - it's where I got my jab!
        
       | jackfoxy wrote:
       | Family lore has it that my great grandfather, living in Manhattan
       | in the last decades of the 19th century, was a race walker, and
       | pretty good at it.
        
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       (page generated 2021-08-02 23:02 UTC)