Sports

The study of female gladiatorial combat encounters the obstacle of the dearth of sources that give testimony of it. Ten literary fragments and one epigraphic inscription is all the written evidence that speaks to us of those women. About graphic sources, the panorama is still more desolate, since a relief found in Halicarnassus is the sole representation we have of gladiator women. Yet, this is so because scholars may not have been able to interpret correctly some other artistic works we have from the Roman period. In this article, I propose that a bronze statuette, currently kept at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe of Hamburg, that scholars have traditionally considered as representing a female athlete holding a strigil, actually depicts a female gladiator (more specifically, a thraex, a gladiatorial type that fought with a short curved dagger, a weapon that to the untrained eye can be confused with a strigil).

In 1569 in the Spanish village of Purchena, a games was held in which a contingent of Turkish soldiers took part – many of them natives from the area that in antiquity was called Greece. These Turks celebrated several events in these games typical of the land of their birth. One of these events was the triple jump. In this article we study the possibility that the jump celebrated by those Turks of the sixteenth century was the same jump that was practised in that part of the eastern Mediterranean during the time of the ancient Olympic games.

Con esta obra Alfonso Mañas se propone introducir al gran público en el fascinante mundo de los gladiadores. El autor, apasionado estudioso de la gladiatura desde hace años, no busca atrapar la atención de los lectores repitiendo las acostumbradas trivialidades a las que nos tienen acostumbrados los medios o las publicaciones de esta temática, sino que aporta información nueva y la presenta con un enfoque novedoso, logrando además combinar felizmente la sencillez y claridad de la exposición con la corrección de los datos. El tono divulgativo del libro no va en menoscabo del rigor científico, basándose la obra en el conocimiento de las fuentes contemporáneas a la gladiatura –tanto visuales, como epigráficas y literarias–.
El lector es introducido gradualmente en una realidad muy lejana a la nuestra, y compleja, que entusiasmaba a las grandes masas y también a los miembros más destacados de la sociedad (emperadores incluidos), que acudían a los anfiteatros para asistir a los combates gladiatorios y a las cacerías de fieras, y para aplaudir a sus favoritos. El autor no ha olvidado tratar ningún aspecto de la gladiatura: expone paso a paso la vida de los gladiadores, desde su reclutamiento pasando por el largo periodo de entrenamiento en la escuela gladiatoria hasta el combate ante el público, e incluso más allá... acompañamos al vencedor en su triunfo y descendemos con el perdedor a la tumba.
Profundiza también en los aspectos más particulares y en las curiosidades, como el sistema de entrenamiento que usaban los gladiadores, la difícil convivencia entre estos que se daba en la escuela, o sus relaciones con sus seguidoras. No se olvida tampoco de las gladiadoras ni de los emperadores que lucharon como gladiadores. Particular atención presta también al Coliseo, el mayor y más famoso anfiteatro, y a los espectáculos que se dieron en él durante los más de cuatro siglos que estuvo en funcionamiento.
Un libro científicamente riguroso, sólidamente documentado y cautivador, que satisfará al lector interesado en descubrir la realidad de la gladiatura, uno de los fenómenos más discutidos y fascinantes de la civilización romana, aunque menos conocido en su verdadera imagen.

In this article we review the epistemological and pedagogical debate on Kinesiology and Physical Education that has been going on in the universities of the US from 1990 to the present. We have compiled the opinions of a wide sample of authors, with the intention of getting the most complete picture of a process that, according to Morrow (2006), seeks to answer the questions "where we come from, who we are, and where we are going". After comparing and analysing the most relevant documents, we conclude that the period 1990-2013, characterized by a bitter struggle between paradigms fought by humanists, positivists, cross-disciplinarists, and sub-disciplinarists, has revealed Rev.int.med.cienc.act.fís.deporte-vol. 16-número 62-ISSN: 1577-0354 258 the eventual predominance of the integrative paradigm of Kretchmar (2007, 2008).

In the representations of retiarii, the net appears very rarely, especially in the later times of gladiatura (third, fourth, and fifth centuries).Traditionally, this scarce presence has been explained by the argument that most artists avoided representing the net, an object supposedly difficult to depict, or because the net was not used in the scene depicted. Yet there is evidence that suggests that, actually, some retiarii fought without the net, above all in the late empire, if not always, at least in some combats. In this paper, we study that evidence.

In this article, we study the evolution of competitive sport and sporting recreations in medieval Córdoba, from the Umayyad Muslims (756–1236) to the Christians (since 1236). In this diachronic study, firstly we compare the competitive sport and sporting recreations of the Muslim East (especially those of the Abbasid period) with those of Muslim Córdoba, in order to know the level of Arabization of those practices in Córdoba, and if competitive sport is more predominant than recreations or vice versa. Secondly, we study if competitive sport and sporting recreations had the same presence in Muslim Córdoba and Christian Córdoba (or if one predominated over the other), and the possible reasons for it. We conclude: (1) that in Muslim Córdoba, sporting recreations were more important than competitive sport, unlike what happened in the great Muslim cities of the East; (2) Arabization is almost total regarding the types of sport and recreations implanted in Córdoba but low regarding horse sports and the importance of competitive sport; and (3) that Christian Córdoba shows a very different character, since competitive sport is very important (largely because by that time Córdoba had become a frontier city).