Sports comp

More people were willing and able to make sports a part of their lives, either by playing sports directly or devoting their leisure time to watching sports.

An important contribution to the development of physical culture, both of his time and of subsequent centuries, was made by the German physician and philanthropist J.K.F. Gutsmuts. He not only wrote textbooks on gymnastics and swimming, as well as a work that popularized sports games, but also introduced gymnastic equipment still in use, including a modernized gymnastic horse and horizontal bar, as well as pole vaulting[23]. Gymnastics actively developed during the 19th century in many European countries, where it was given applied importance in the context of the growth of national self-consciousness and the need for mass military training. Their gymnastic schools appeared in France, Denmark, the German states, Switzerland, the Czech Republic (at that time part of the Austrian Empire) and Sweden. The Swedish teacher Hjalmar Ling, the son of the therapist Per Ling, developed a number of gymnastic equipment used to this day - a bench with a saddle (a further development of the gymnastic horse), a beam, a wall bars, a jumping springboard [24]. In Russia, by the beginning of the 20th century, the Czech, Swedish and German gymnastic schools, as well as their own system of physical education, developed by P.F. Lesgaft[25], were especially popular.

The gentlemen themselves preferred to play cricket, which did not require much physical effort and did not pose a danger to health. The Industrial Revolution and mass production meant that more and more people began to have free time. This, in turn, became the key to the mass character of the sport. More people were willing and able to make sports a part of their lives, either by playing sports directly or devoting their leisure time to watching sports. In 1722, the first figure skating textbook was published in England, and in 1742, the world's first figure skating sports society, the Edinburgh Skating Club, was opened. The English approach to sports spread throughout continental Europe and overseas colonies, becoming dominant in the Western world; Under the influence of the "sport of gentlemen", the competitive element also penetrated into national sports, in particular, into speed skating in Holland

The website of the international convention "SportAccord", which unites over 100 international sports federations, offers a definition of sport, which includes the following criteria: a competitive element; lack of rules based on an element of chance or luck; elimination of unnecessary risk to the health and safety of participants and spectators; non-deliberate harm to living beings; the absence of a monopoly of a single manufacturer on the necessary equipment[2].

There is no clear definition of sport that unambiguously separates sport itself from other types of leisure, although attempts to define the boundaries of the concept have been made repeatedly. Rabelais used the word "desporter" to mean "to have fun"[1]. In the modern sense, this word began to be used by the Scottish psychiatrist Thomas Arnold, who studied the effect of physical exercise on human health.

Sport is a specific kind of physical or intellectual activity performed for the purpose of competition, as well as targeted preparation for them through warm-up, training.