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Answering the legitimate call for a more transnational approach to the history of sport in Europe, we seize upon the 2012 Olympic Games as an opportunity to look back on Belgo-British contacts in sport since the Middle Ages. Contextualising this history within the wider Belgo-British political, economic and cultural contacts is, indeed, much more revealing than recounting a superficial story about the three medals the Belgian Olympic delegation actually obtained in London. We illustrate that transnational flows and contacts – crucial to the shaping and diffusion of sport – are not always reflected at the level of the Olympic Games. The cases of cycle racing and soccer demonstrate the divergent adoption and adaptation processes of specific sporting disciplines in Belgium and Britain. At the end of the paper, we also reflect on David Cameron's competitive sport policy in primary education, and raise the question whether the dissipation of public funds for elite sport – to the detriment of ‘Sport for All’ – ...

Existing research on nineteenth-century cycling focuses more on its role in shaping modern tourism than on its urban origins. In this paper, in contrast, we analyse the emergence of cycling in four of Belgium's leading industrial and commercial cities: Brussels, Antwerp, Liege and Ghent. From the 1860s onwards, a ‘golden age’ of urban planning created new sites of bourgeois power and display in these urban centres. Simultaneously, the new, adventurous sport of cycling was picked up by the younger members of this bourgeoisie. Their increasing presence in the newly constructed urban streets and parks, however, was fraught with conflict. Dealing with a negative public image, problematic interactions with other road users and limiting traffic regulations, cyclists constantly had to legitimise their urban presence. Especially in the 1890s, cycling clubs and umbrella associations attempted to discipline cyclists and to foster the image of urban cycling as an orderly, socially respectable form of leisure. This, ...