Matthew T. Bowers

Assessing the Relationship Between Youth Sport Participation Settings and Creativity in Adulthood

This article presents an assessment of the relative influences of time spent participating in organized sports and informal sports during childhood with respect to the development of general creativity. In this study, 99 upper-division undergraduate and graduate students completed a comprehensive childhood leisure activities questionnaire and the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults. According to the results of the joint generalized least-squares regression analysis, hours spent in organized sport settings was negatively related to creativity as an adult; time spent in unstructured sport settings was found to be positively related to adult creativity. The findings also point to the importance of balancing participation across organized and unstructured settings. The most creative individuals in the sample were those who spent roughly half of their sport participation time in each setting, as opposed to individuals with below-average creativity, who spent upwards of 3/4 of their sport participation time in organized settings. Therefore, fostering creative development through sport may not require a dramatic reorientation from current youth sport development models, but only a shift toward a more balanced distribution of time spent playing in both organized and unstructured settings. Future experiments are needed to test this relationship.

The President's Council on Physical Fitness and the Systematisation of Children's Play in America

This article examines the influence of physical education philosophies on the shift in policies aimed at augmenting the physical fitness of children in the United States during the Cold War. While the existing historiography on federal sport initiatives during this period astutely recognises the broader shift in focus from mass fitness programmes during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations to elite sport development under Nixon and Ford, the literature often overlooks significant nuances between the mass fitness policies enacted by Eisenhower and Kennedy. When Eisenhowers ‘total fitness’ approach fell out of favour politically, and the philosophical terrain within the field of physical education shifted towards the quantification of exercise, the Kennedy administration established a utilitarian, systematised sport and fitness policy based on measurable performance standards. This tack was a significant departure from the policy focus under Eisenhower, which emphasised play-oriented, sports-based programmes.

Drugs, the Law, and the Downfall of Dancer's Image at the 1968 Kentucky Derby: A Case Study on Human Conceptions of Domesticated Animals

The disqualification of Dancers Image at the 1968 Kentucky Derby for the presence of a prohibited substance reveals much about the human–animal relationship. The horse was, on the one hand, depicted in anthropomorphic terms as an honourable competitor unjustly stripped of a victory. At the same time, Dancers Image was treated as simply a piece of physical property. In short, human conceptions of domesticated animals are dichotomous in nature.

The Diplomatic Context of Doping in the Former German Democratic Republic: A Revisionist Examination

Paying particular attention to political dynamics within the Eastern-bloc, this article seeks to outline the diplomatic context of what remains the most notorious episode of state-level doping in modern sport history: the cold war-era doping program run by the German Democratic Republics Stasi national security police and intelligence organisation. To do so, it aims to integrate archival research on the subject with high-level geopolitical analysis. This approach offers more nuanced perspectives on the diplomatic meaning of sport and performance-enhancement in East Germany than is present in the existing literature.