Global InformationSport in the United Kingdom information
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Sport in the United Kingdom plays an important role in British culture and the United Kingdom has played a significant role in the organisation and spread of sporting culture globally. In the infancy of many organised sports, the Home Nations (England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland) were heavily involved in setting out the formal rules of many sports and formed among the earliest separate governing bodies,[tone] national teams and domestic league competitions. After 1922, some sports formed separate bodies for Northern Ireland, though many continued to be organised on an all-Ireland basis. For this reason, in many though not all sports, most domestic and international sport is carried on a Home Nations basis, and England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland (or Northern Ireland) are recognised as national entities.
In a small number of sports, these teams are supplemented by high-profile events, featuring a combined team representing one or more Home nations. The most notable examples of such arrangements are the British and Irish Lions in rugby union (and formerly the British Lions in rugby league), the Walker Cup golf team and Great Britain at the Olympics in relation to Olympic sports ordinarily organised on a Home Nations basis.
In other sports, especially individual Olympic sports such as athletics, swimming, cycling and triathlon, or those team sports invented outside the United Kingdom, e.g. basketball, baseball, ice hockey and volleyball, the United Kingdom generally participates as one nation, usually under the name Great Britain or, more rarely, as Great Britain and Northern Ireland; the latter is the official name of the United Kingdom's team at the Olympic Games, though it is commonly referred to, not uncontroversially, as the former. Teams rarely, if ever, compete under the designation 'United Kingdom', reflected in the standard abbreviations GB and GBR.
Overall, association football attracts the most viewers and money, though the nation is notable for the diversity of its sporting interests, especially at the elite level. Great Britain has a special affinity with both Olympic Sport as the only nation to win at least one gold medal at every Summer Games, and with Paralympic Sport as the birthplace of the modern Paralympic movement in Stoke Mandeville Hospital in 1948. The capital London was the first city to host three Summer Olympic Games, and the United Kingdom has twice hosted the Paralympic Games, in London in 2012 and in Stoke Mandeville in 1984.
Major individual sports include athletics, cycling, golf, motorsport, and horse racing. The United Kingdom hosts significant major events across many sports annually, which see a seasonal uptick of interest in that sport for the duration of the event. Tennis is the highest profile sport for the two weeks of the Wimbledon Championships, but otherwise struggles to hold its own in the country of its birth, France.[specify] Snooker and darts, too, enjoy period profile boosts in line with the holding of their largest events.The Boat Race in rowing, the All England Open Badminton Championships, Badminton and Burghley Horse Trials in three-day eventing, the London Marathon enjoy similar global renown within their fields, and peak interest for short periods nationally. The Open Championship in golf also peaks periodic interest domestically as the only non-US and oldest Major, but golf maintains a reasonably high-profile throughout the year and is a significant social sport.
Many other sports are also played and followed to a lesser degree. There is much debate over which sport has the most active participants with swimming, athletics, and cycling all found to have wider active participation than association football in the 2010 Sport England Active People Survey.[1] After the United States, which is acknowledged as the greatest sporting nation in the world, the United Kingdom is considered one of the top performing sporting nations in the world.[2][3][4][5]
- ^ "Sports Council for England". Sport England. 2010. Archived from the original on 4 July 2011. Retrieved 21 June 2011.
- ^ "Top 10 Greatest Sports Countries".
- ^ "Greatest Sporting Nation". Greatest Sporting Nation.
- ^ "Olympics medal table by country". Statista.
- ^ "1,000 times gold – The thousand medals of Team USA – Washington Post". The Washington Post.