The Sport of Kings Is Back in Fashion The Sport of Kings Is Back in Fashion
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Illustration by Karyna Piwowarska
Good Mood

The Sport of Kings Is Back in Fashion

A Brief History of Hawaiian Surfing
Piotr Żelazny
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time 6 minutes

Christian missionaries took a lot of trouble to kill off the sacred sports of the inhabitants of Hawaii. Fortunately, they failed. Today, surfing is increasingly popular all around the world, and enthusiasts have thrown themselves into resurrecting the Hawaiian pastime of ‘sledging’ down the slopes of volcanoes.

“For expert surfers going upland to farm, if part way up perhaps they look back and see the rollers combing the beach, will leave their work […] then, hurrying away home, they will pick up the board and go. All thought of work is at the end, only that of sport is left. The wife may go hungry, the children, the whole family, but the head of the house does not care. He is all for sport, that is his food.”

This isn’t an excerpt from the latest edition of Surfer magazine (the professional surfers’ ‘bible’) describing Hawaiian

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When Women Had the Field When Women Had the Field
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Carmen Pomies (left) and Florrie Redford, public domain
Experiences

When Women Had the Field

The Story of Women’s Football
Piotr Żelazny

Girls used to be so good at kicking pigskins, and audiences adored them so much, that men felt threatened. So they destroyed women’s football.

Future generations would call this tragedy World War I, but back then it was just a war. A calamitous, heinous conflict that required men and boys to put on their uniforms and heavy boots, strap on their rifles and march ahead. ‘The war to end all wars’ summoned 70 million people; five million from the United Kingdom alone, 700,000 of which were to never come back to Yorkshire, Kent, Oxford, Manchester, London, and countless other cities, towns and villages. They would never see their home towns again. Over 1.5 million did come back, wounded and traumatized.

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