SPORTS

SPORTS                                                                                                                                                              Sports are very important in our lives.Our life is incomplete without sports.So we have to give importance to sports along with studies.Sports like Cricket, Volleyball, Football, Kabaddi, all these are played at the international level.

                                                                          SPORTS                                                                              CRICKET  :  Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of which is a 22-yard (20-metre) pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. Two players from the batting team (the striker and non striker) stand in front of either wicket, with one player from the fielding team (the bowler) bowling the ball towards the striker's wicket from the opposite end of the pitch. The striker's goal is to hit the bowled ball and then switch places with the non striker, with the batting team scoring one run for each exchange. Runs are also scored when the ball reaches or crosses the boundary of the field or when the ball is bowled illegally.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              VOLLY BALL   :   Volleyball is a team sport in which two teams of six players are separated by a net. Each team tries to score points by grounding a ball on the other team's court under organized rules.[1] It has been a part of the official program of the Summer Olympic Games since Tokyo 1964. Beach volleyball was introduced to the programme at the Atlanta 1996 Summer Olympics. The adapted version of volleyball at the Summer Paralympic Games is sitting volleyball.                                                                                                                                                                                                                  FOOTBALL    :     The first known examples of a team game involving a ball, which was made out of a rock, occurred in old Mesoamerican cultures for over 3,000 years ago. It was by the Aztecs called T chatali, although various versions of the game were spread over large regions. In some ritual occasions, the ball would symbolize the sun and the captain of the losing team would be sacrificed to the gods. A unique feature of the Mesoamerican ball game versions was a bouncing ball made of rubber – no other early culture had access to rubber.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       KABADDI     :    Kabaddi is basically a combative sport, with seven players on each side; played for a period of 40 minutes with a 5 minutes break (20-5-20). The core idea of the game is to score points by raiding into the opponent's court and touching as many defense players as possible without getting caught on a single breath.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                       SPORTS                 :                 IMPORTANCE                                                                                                                                                        

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              SPORTS                                                                                 Boxing

The earliest evidence of boxing can be traced back to Egypt circa 3000 BC. Boxing as a sport was introduced to the ancient Olympic Games in the 7th century BC, at which time, boxers’ hands and forearms were bound with soft leather thongs for protection. Romans later traded in leather thongs for metal-studded gloves called cestus.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, boxing died out and did not make a comeback until the 17th century. The English officially organized amateur boxing in 1880, designating five weight classes: Bantam, not exceeding 54 kilos (119 pounds); Feather, not exceeding 57 kilos (126 pounds); Light, not exceeding 63.5 kilos (140 pounds); Middle, not exceeding 73 kilos (161 pounds); and Heavy, any weight.

When boxing made its Olympic debut at the 1904 Games in St. Louis, the USA was the only country entered, and as a result, took home all the medals. Since its initial admittance in the Olympic program, the sport has been included at all of the subsequent Games, with the exception of the 1912 Stockholm Games, since boxing was outlawed there. But Sweden wasn't the only place where fisticuffs were illegal. For a good deal the 19th century, boxing was not considered a legitimate sport in America. Bare-knuckle boxing was outlawed as a criminal activity and boxing matches were regularly raided by the police.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Gymnastics

Gymnastics began in ancient Greece as a form of exercise for both men and women that combined physical coordination, strength, and dexterity with tumbling and acrobatic skills. (The translation for the word “gymnasium” from the original Greek is “to exercise naked.”) Early gymnastics exercises included running, jumping, swimming, throwing, wrestling, and weight lifting. Once the Romans conquered Greece, gymnastics became more formalized. Roman gymnasiums were mostly used to prepare their legions for the rigors of battle. With the exception of tumbling, which remained a fairly popular form of entertainment, as the Roman Empire declined, the interest in gymnastics, along with several other sports favored by gladiators and soldiers dwindled as well.

In 1774, when prominent German educational reformer Johann Bernhard Basedow added physical exercise to the realistic courses of study he advocated at his school in Dessau, Saxony, modern gymnastics—and the Germanic countries’ fascination with them—took off. By the late 1700s, German Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (the "father of modern gymnastics”) had introduced the sidebar, the horizontal bar, the parallel bars, the balance beam, and jumping events. German educator Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths (also known as Guts Muth or Gutsmuths and the "grandfather of gymnastics") developed a more graceful form of gymnastics focusing on rhythmic movement, opening the Jahn's school in Berlin in 1811. Soon after, gymnastics clubs began to spring up in both continental Europe and Great Britain. As gymnastics evolved, the Greco-Roman events of weight lifting and wrestling were dropped. There was also a shift in emphasis from simply beating an opponent to the pursuit of excellence in form.

Dr. Dudley Allen Sargent, a pioneering Civil War-era physical education teacher, athletic proponent, lecturer, and prolific inventor of gymnastic equipment (with more than 30 pieces of apparatus to his credit) introduced the sport to the United States. Thanks to a wave of immigration at the end of the 19th century, an increasing number of turnverein (from the German “turnen,” meaning to perform gymnastic exercises + “verein,” meaning club) sprang up as recently arrived Europeans sought to bring their love of the sport to their new homeland.

Men’s gymnastics debuted at the Olympic Games in 1896, and have been included in all Games since 1924. An all-around women’s competition arrived in 1936, followed by a competition for separate events in 1952. During early competitions, male gymnasts from Germany, Sweden, Italy, and Switzerland, dominated the competition, but by the ’50s, Japan, the Soviet Union, and several Eastern European nations were turning out top male and female gymnasts. The widespread coverage of Olympic performances by the Soviet Union’s Olga Korbut in the 1972 Olympics and Nadia Comaneci of Romania at the 1976 Games raised the profile gymnastics dramatically, resulting in a major promotion of the sport, particularly for women in the China and the United States.

Modern international competition has six events for men—the rings, parallel bars, horizontal bar, side or pommel-horse, long or vaulting horse, and floor (or free) exercise, and four events for women—vaulting horse, balance beam, uneven bars, and floor exercise (which is performed with musical accompaniment). Tumbling and trampoline exercises are also included in many U.S. competitions. Rhythmic gymnastics, a non-acrobatic performance of graceful choreographed moves incorporating the use of a ball, hoop, rope, or ribbons, have been an Olympic sport since 1984.