In this essay we will use a historical approach to comprehend, firstly, the progress and challenges of the Swedish Sport Movement, and secondly, as a stimulus to a reflection on current challenges in regard to the policy and organization of Swedish sport.Thus, the famous Swedish painter Anders Zorn, and his entrepreneurial approach in regard to ski competitions, in addition to his naturalistic ideas, stood in the early 1900 as a (serious) challenge to the initial progress of the Swedish Sport Confederation and its tradition, ideology and, in the prolongation, its hegemonic position. This historical review will, additionally, be related to a contemporary case -'The Motor Sport Case'- in which the Swedish Sport Model has become challenged by EU Law and Competition Law. The presentation will offer a fair amount of - archeological - evidence to better understand the inherent (generic) conflicts as well as the hegemony of the Swedish sport movement. The theoretical framework builds roughly on the perspectives of power and hegemony, which includes concept such as domination, encapsulation, rebellion and noncomplia nce.The reflection focuses on the'organizational capital'as the vital drive in the progress of the Swedish Sport Confederation and its monopoly.

The Singular Slalom Skier from Kittelfjäll: A Biographical Study About Bengt-Erik Grahn

This article is a sports biography of Bengt-Erik Grahn, a prominent figure in Swedish alpine skiing during the 1960s. By discussing representations of Bengt-Erik Grahn in the Swedish daily press and comparing these with his own life story and memories from his time as an elite alpine skier, the objective is to study the cultural identities that appear in relation to his sports career. Bengt-Erik Grahn grew up in a Sami family in Kittelfjall in the Swedish province of Vasterbotten and spent his early school years at the Sami nomad school in Tarnaby. Due to his Sami background and position as a representative of the Swedish national alpine team, the article focuses in particular on how identity constructs such as "Swedishness" and "Saminess" appear in the source material. For instance, it is argued that his Sami identity served an important function when Bengt-Erik Grahn was depicted as a Swedish sports hero. In addition, his Sami background, meager way of life, odd sporting outfit (a hand-knitted wool sweater and hat) and profession as a forestry worker were all characteristics presented in the press coverage as distinguishing the Swedish sporting identity of amateurism from what was perceived as a jet-set and playboy mentality represented by the professional Continental European alpine skiers. However, simultaneously with this idealization, Bengt-Erik Grahn's Simi heritage was also used as a stereotype to explain his aggressive and risky tactics, which often resulted in crashes in the most important competitions. Bengt-Erik Grahn's own life story in several ways offers nuance to the perceptions of the daily press. In particular, it reveals the challenges facing Bengt-Erik Grahn in his youth as he chose to focus on a career in alpine skiing. For example, there were strong expectations that a Sami skier should devote him- or herself to cross-country skiing, which was considered a traditional Sami sport at the time. Alpine skiing, on the other hand, was perceived as modern and alien to Sami sports culture. In that way, Bengt-Erik Grahn's odd and independent way of skiing appears in his life story as a demonstration of empowerment. Despite the prevailing culture, he chose the sport and how to perform it entirely on his own.

The aim of this compilation thesis is to shed light on the Sámi history of ski sport in Sweden from an organizational and cultural history perspective where concepts like nation and ethnicity fill an important function. The Sámi are an indigenous people living in Sápmi, a land area extending across the North Calotte region and including parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. The thesis contains six separate articles which together comprise a research period extending between 1879 and 1990.  The articles have been studied from different points of view with the focus on how skis as sport equipment have been historically charged with cultural expressions created by the individual skiers as well as by the general public’s interest in skiing. These cultural expressions have also been internalized as collective identification objects positioning the mutual relations between groups and collectives. By historical links to kings, heroic myths and polar expeditions, the sport of skiing has, for example, become associated with a national Swedish identity. By pinpointing its Sámi origins in the light of history, the ski sport is in this thesis instead viewed as a culturally heterogeneous phenomenon.    In three of the articles of the thesis, the Sámi history of Swedish ski sport is studied. The focus of these studies lies on how ”Sáminess” and ”Swedishness”, viewed as cultural identities, were constructed in connection with the early rise and development of ski sport from the late 19th century to the interwar period (Articles I and II) as well as with the sporting career of downhill skier Bengt-Erik Grahn in the 1960s (Article V). The studies illustrate that, at its rise and early development, cross-country skiing in Sweden was regarded as a Sámi sport. In the early 20th century, however, an ethnic borderline was created between what was Sámi and what was Swedish, which gradually invisibilized the Sámi link to ski sport. Instead, cross-country skiing acquired the inofficial character of being the Swedish national sport. The three remaining studies investigate the separately organized Sámi sport movement from its rise in 1948 through the year 1990 (Articles III, IV and VI). The origin of this movement derives from the Sámi Championships, a winter event whose original contests include skiing and other sports with a background in reindeer husbandry.  The articles clarify the importance of ski sport in creating contrastive ethnic identities between Sáminess and Swedishness (Articles I–V). Similarly, these constructed cultural markers of Sáminess and Swedishness have been interwoven to symbolize an overarching ethnic national identity (Articles IV–V). In addition, the way ski sport has been operated within the separately organized Sámi sport movement has carried weight in the creation of Sápmi as a crossborder nation (Article VI).  

This article sets out to discuss the material culture of traditional physical education from an ethnobiological point of view. The focus is on the use of reed, Phragmites australis Trin. ex Steud., club-rush, Schoenoplectus lacustris L., inflated skins and animal bladders when making buoyancy devices used by children and adolescents for learning to swim. As these teaching methods occurred from thousands of years ago up to very recently, it is argued that child-related practices connected with the bio-cultural domain and arising out of human-biota interaction have noticeably transcended time and societal changes.

A common topic of discussion among baseball historians is the question whether baseball is the ancestor of rounders or not. In order to shed new light on this debate, historians need to expand the limited knowledge about the old bat-and-ball games of Continental Europe in order to develop a more cogent consideration of the origins of baseball. Traditional European bat-and-ball games, known by names such as 'longball', schlagball, meta, palant or lapta, have been overlooked in previous studies on the roots of baseball. By comparing variants of this game and baseball, as described by Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths in the late eighteenth century, resemblances and connections between English bat-and-ball games and counterparts in Continental Europe are highlighted.

It is widely agreed that sport and national identity are two interwoven phenomena. Recently, researchers have taken an interest in how sport has been used for nation-building purposes among groups not defined in terms of nation-states. These include the Sámi, an Indigenous people living in an area that extends over the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Sámi championships and a Sámi national football team have been important elements in shaping a Sámi national identity across the state borders. Against this background, the historical development that led to the formation in 1990 of a Sámi National Sports Federation was highly complicated. The period from 1970 to 1990 was fraught by the dilemma of how sport was to be organized – based on the division of the Sámi by state borders or through a transnational Sámi sports organization. The outcome was a compromise in that the Sámi National Sports Federation was founded as an umbrella organization under which Sámi in Norway, Sámi in Finland, and Sámi in Sweden established separate and autonomous Sámi ‘district associations’.

Ethnomycology is the study of the bio-cultural aspects of human-fungal interactions. This article discusses the involvement of the bracket fungus Fomitopsis betulina within the material culture of traditional games. With a particular focus on the Nordic countries, the aim is to review and analyze the use of simple balls made of bracket fungi. We argue that the fungi ball can be considered the precursor of the rubber (and the gutta-percha) ball. Moreover, the replacement of fungi balls with rubber balls marks, to a certain extent, a temporal transition from traditional folk games with roots in pre-industrial society to modern sports in which balls and other equipment received a more standardized shape.