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The use of sport for media, marketing and political propaganda purposes led to inevitable distortions in sports history. The paper focuses on definition of truth and then on specific examples of propagandist abuses in totalitarian states, e.g. deleting the names of Jewish athletes from sports statistics in Nazi Germany or of politically troublesome athletes in the USSR and its satellite communist states before 1989. Another distortion in sport history can be found in modern "official" publications sponsored by various institutions, e.g. sports organizations and associations. Such sponsors choose not to publish some facts that may be inconvenient to them. Also, the media contribute to the false image of sport, e.g. by pandering to mass audiences, creating an artificial atmosphere of enormous sporting battles and tournaments to attract viewers, and presenting distorted facts from the careers of elite athletes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sport practiced in extreme conditions of World War II behind the barbed wire of concentration camps and POW camps is one of the most heroic chapters in all its history. With the use of selected memoirs of prisoners' from Nazi concentration camps and POW camps the author presents types of physical exercises practiced by camp prisoners and analyzes unusual conditions in which the said prisoners demonstrated not just their love of sport, but the will to survive in the psychological sense and to maintain minimum physical vitality. The author discusses two basic types of Lager sports: those organized secretly by the prisoners, which involved secret food services for the 'athletes' (some being real athletes detained by the Nazis); and those arranged by the Germans in order to trick and convince international organizations, such as the Red Cross Committee, that human rights were respected in their camps. Refined forms of "sport exercises" as a system of torturing prisoners are also mentioned. Examples from following concentrations camps and POW camps such as Auschwitz, Dobiegniew (Woldernberg), Mauthausen and Nurnberg are provided. Details of POW camps, like Colditz, where the Commonwealth soldiers and officers were detained and engaged in different British sports such as football and stoolball, are discussed in association with a parallel paper delivered by Dr Joanna Witkowska on British Sport in POW Camps during World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the religious aspects of sport. According to the author, symbolism and ritual practices have existed in sport from ancient times into the present day, with varying degrees of intentionality. It is suggested that modern sports can meet para-beliefs or para-creeds, forms of belief or superstition which are not taken completely seriously but can still be important to practitioners. Details related to the symbolic assimilation of pagan imagery and ritual into Christianity are presented. Other topics include ball games and running events in Christian worship and the symbolic meanings of dualism in team sports.

The article justifies the necessity of studies of language of sport within the scope of general linguistics. The research in this particular area has been sporadic and insufficient. The article presents a historical overview of studies on sport vocabulary, from ancient Greece, through medieval lexicons of games and plays to modern sports. The author focuses on Old Polish names of games and pastimes as well as on the influence of English sport vocabulary on Polish and other European languages. He points to the rather superficial interest of general linguists in the area of sport language, but also reveals examples of successful research. The article lists the existing written studies and dictionaries of sport terminology, starting from the oldest known source in the English language Sportsman's Dictionary from 1735. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction this issue of the journal "Studies in Physical Culture and Tourism" is presented.