CONFERENCE: 14th CESH Congress

14th CESH Congress. Pisa, Italy, 17.-20. September 2009‏

Sport and a Sense of the Body's limits

Ulysses, in his last travel through Dante's Hell (canto XXVI), remembering
the perilous vicissitudes of his return home, mentioned words he had
addressed to his men in order to spur them on without fear:

Consider your roots: you were not born to live like brutes,
but to follow virtue and knowledge (vv.118-120).

This very famous quotation from Dante's Hell remains for us today an
exaltation of the search for knowledge and overcoming of every limitation.
Even if we refresh our memory of the encounter between the Poet and Ulysses
in the eighth circle of Hell, the one about false ideas, we are also
reminded of the condemnation that the middle ages inflicted on those, like
Galileo, who dared to defy the divine laws. Pisa celebrates in 2009 the
fourth centenary of Galileo's first astronomical observations through a
telescope (1609).

The CESH Congress
Over the years CESH has analyzed sport historically from different angles
(politics, art, culture, globalization, transnationality, critical points
such as violence etc.). At the 14th Congress we intend to encourage a debate
on a sense of the body’s limits, as seen as a sporting challenge and an
element of progress and modernity (analysis of transformations of sporting
techniques) or as a measurable limit (records, sense of competition,
exaltation of self value) characteristics verifiable at all ages.
The historical perspective allows us to associate bio-medical aspects - by
now unanimously accepted from the Motor Science field - with those
humanistics, artificers of the rebirth of sport. History allows us to
characterize the path just made, or rather, the routes over which men and
women have moved in an attempt to satisfy their recreational and also their
competitive desires.

As for the famous Columns of Hercules, they are unsurpassed; after all,
what comes next could be Hell. The Congress hopes to stimulate students to
analyze from a socio-historical point of view the reasons for deviance
caused by some protagonists in the world of sport, when they decide to
surpass every possible limit.