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Sport in Australia is an important part of the country's culture, dating back to the early colonial period. Cricket, Australian rules football, rugby union and horse racing are among the earliest organised sports in Australia. Sport has shaped the Australian national identity through events such as the Ashes, the Melbourne Cup and the America's Cup. There are a number of professional sport leagues in Australia, including the Australian Football League (Australian rules football), Big Bash League and Sheffield Shield (cricket), the National Basketball League and Women's National Basketball League (basketball), A-League and W-League (soccer), National Rugby League (rugby league), Super Rugby (rugby union), ANZ Championship (netball) and the International V8 Supercars Championship (touring car racing). Attendance for the A-League, AFL and NRL over the course of a single season tops six million. The media plays an important part in Australia's sporting landscape, with many sporting events televised or covered on radio. The government has anti-siphoning laws to protect free-to-air stations. Beyond televising live events, there are many sport-related television and radio programs, as well as several magazine publications dedicated to sport. Australian sport has also been the subject of Australian made films such as ''The Club'', ''Australian Rules'', ''The Final Winter'' and ''Footy Legends''. As a nation, Australia has competed in many international events, including the Olympics and Paralympics. ==History== (詳細はBatman's Hill in 1838, with the first race meeting in Victoria taking place in 1840. Cricket was also underway with the Melbourne Cricket Club founded in 1838. Sport was being used during the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s as a form of social integration across classes. Victorian rules football (later known as Australian rules) was codified in 1859. Australian football clubs still around in the current Australian Football League were founded by 1858. The Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia's largest sporting arena, opened in 1853. The Melbourne Cup was first run in 1861. A rugby union team was established at the University of Sydney in 1864. Regular sport did not begin to be played in South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia until the late 1860s and early 1870s. The first Australian cricket team to go on tour internationally did so in 1868. The Australian side was an all Aboriginal one and toured England where they played 47 games, where they won 14 games, drew 19 and lost 14.Australia's adoption of sport as a national was pastime was so comprehensive that Anthony Trollope remarked in his book, ''Australia'', published in 1870, "The English passion for the amusements which are technically called 'sports', is not a national necessity with the Americans, whereas with the Australians it is almost as much so as home." Soccer was being played in Australia by the 1810s, with the first team formally being organised in Sydney in 1880 that was named the Wanderers. Sport was receiving coverage in Australian newspapers by 1876 when a sculling race in England was reported on in the ''Sydney Morning Herald.'' In 1877, Australia played in the first Test Cricket match against England. In 1882, The Ashes were started following the victory of the Australia national cricket team over England. Field hockey teams for men and women were established by 1890. The Sheffield Shield cricket competition was first held in 1891 with New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia participating in the inaugural competition. The remaining states would not participate until much later, with Queensland first participating in 1926–27, Western Australia in 1947–48 and Tasmania in 1982–83. In 1897 the Victorian Football League, which later became the AFL the Australian Football League, was founded after breaking away from the Victorian Football Association. The first badminton competition in Australia was played in 1900.〔 The first ice hockey game was played in Melbourne on 12 July 1906 between a local Melbourne team and a team from the crew of the visiting US warship USS ''Baltimore''.〔 Rugby league has been the overwhelmingly dominant rugby code in Australia since 1908 (this position remains unchallenged to this day). When Messenger and the All Golds returned from Great Britain in 1908, they helped the new clubs adapt to the rules of rugby league prior to the inaugural 1908 NSWRFL season. The Queensland Rugby Football League also formed early in 1908 by seven rugby players who were dissatisfied with the administration of the Queensland Rugby Union.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Story of the QRL )〕 The Australia national rugby union team had their first international test against New Zealand in 1903, and first international tour in 1908, earning their nickname of the Wallabies after two British journalists used it to refer to the team. The team won gold at the 1908 Summer Olympics; however the majority of the squad joined rugby league clubs upon returning to Australia. Women represented Australia for the first time at the Olympics in 1912. Surfing came to Australia by 1915 with the first surf life saving competition being held that year. Les Darcy began his boxing career in 1915, with some of his later fights taking place at Sydney Stadium. The following year, an American promoter encouraged Darcy to go to the United States at a time when Australia was actively recruiting young men for the armed services. Controversy resulted and Darcy died at the age of 21 in the United States. When his body was returned to Australia, 100,000 people attended his Sydney funeral.〔〔〔〔 Darcy would remain significant to Australians into the 2000s, when Kevin Rudd mentioned his story.〔 In 1922, a committee in Australia investigated the benefits of physical education for girls. They came up with several recommendations regarding what sports were and were not appropriate for girls to play based on the level of fitness required. It was determined that for some individual girls that for medical reasons, the girls should probably not be allowed to participate in tennis, netball, lacrosse, golf, hockey, and cricket. Football was completely medically inappropriate for girls to play. It was medically appropriate for all girls to be able to participate in, so long as they were not done in an overly competitive manner, swimming, rowing, cycling and horseback riding.〔 Dick Eve won Australia's first Olympic diving gold medal in 1924.〔 In 1924 the Australian Rugby League Board of Control, later to be known as the Australian Rugby League, was formed to administer the national team (the Kangaroos), and later as the national governing body for the sport of Rugby League. In 1928 the team also adopted the national colours of green and gold for the first time, having previously used blue and maroon, making the Kangaroos the third national sporting body to do so after cricket (from 1899) and the Australian Olympic team (from 1908). Netball Australia was founded in 1927 as the All Australia Women's Basket Ball Association. During the 1930s, the playing of sport on Sunday was banned in most country outside South Australia.〔 The Bodyline cricket series between Australia and England took place in 1932–33. The English side were very determined to win, using physical intimidation against Australia to insure it. The bowling style used by the team known body-line bowling was devised by Douglas Jardine with advice from Frank Foster in England ahead of the series in order to defeat Australian batsman Donald Bradman. Going into the start of the series, Bill Voce told the media "If we don't beat you, we'll knock your bloody heads off." The style of play was such that the Australians contemplated cancelling the series after the Adelaide test. Following a successful Australian racing career, the race horse Phar Lap went to the United States where he died. There were many conspiracy theories at the time and later that suggested people in the United States poisoned the horse to prevent him from winning. Australian women's sports had an advantage over many other women's sport organisations around the world in the period after World War II. Women's sports organisations had largely remained intact and were holding competitions during the war period. This structure survived in the post war period. Women's sport were not hurt because of food rationing, petrol rationing, population disbursement, and other issues facing post-war Europe. In September 1949, Australian Canoeing is founded as the Australian Canoe Federation.〔 By the 1960s, Australia had an international identity as a sport-obsessed country, an identity which was embraced inside the country. This was so well known that in a 1962 edition of ''Sports Illustrated'', Australia was named the most sports obsessed country in the world. In 1967, Australia hosted the second World Netball Championships in Perth. That same year, South Australia became the last state to lift its ban on the playing of sports on Sunday.〔 Starting in the early 1970s, Australian sport underwent a paradigm shift with sponsorship becoming one of the fundamental drivers of earnings for Australian sport on amateur and professional levels. By the mid-1980s, the need for the ability to acquire sponsorship dollars in sport was so great that job applicants for sport administrator positions were expected to be able to demonstrate an ability to get it. During the 1970s, Australia was being routinely defeated in major international competitions as Eastern Bloc countries enjoyed strong government support for sport. The Liberal governments at the time were opposed to similar intervention in Australia's sporting system as they felt it would be government intrusion into an important component of Australian life. In the 1974 elections, several Australian sporting competitors endorsed the Liberal party in advertisements that ran on television. Competitors involved included Ron Barassi, NSWRL player Johnny Raper and horse trainer Tommie Smith. That year, the Australian team qualified for the 1974 FIFA World Cup, the first successful qualification to the FIFA World Cup in the country's history after failing to qualify to the 1966 and 1970 tournaments. It would prove to be the only appearance for the Australian team for more than three decades. The regional football code divide in Australia was still present in the 1980s, with rugby league football being the dominant code in Queensland, ACT and New South Wales while Australian rules football dominated in the rest of the country. When codes went outside of their traditional geographic home, they had little success in gaining new fans and participants. The Australian Institute of Sport was founded in 1981. In the lead up to and during the 1982 Commonwealth Games, the police were called upon to stop protests by Aboriginal land rights activists who staged protests timed with the event in order to politicise the event. Australia had competitors in the America's Cup yacht race for a number of years. Going into the 1983 race, the Australian media was not that interested in the race as they expected a similar result and in the media lead-up to the event, made it out to be a race for rich people. This lack of interest continued throughout the early races. Near the end, when Australia finally appeared poised to win it, millions of Australians turned on their television to watch the Australia II win the competition. That year, the Liberals used Australian tennis star John Newcombe and race car drivers Peter Brock and Alan Jones in their political advertising. Athletes would again be used, this time by the Labor Party, in the 1989 elections. During the 1980s, Australian soccer players began to start playing regularly in overseas professional leagues, with the most successful player of the decade being Craig Johnston who scored a goal in the 1986 F.A. Cup Final for Liverpool. During the 1980s, the federal government created a number of sport programs including Aussie Sports and Active Australia. The Australia women's national field hockey team began their run as one of the top teams in the world in 1985, a place they would hold until 2000. In 1990, the Victorian Football League changed its name to the Australian Football League. During the 1990s, soccer in Australia faced a challenge in attracting youth players because of the ethnic nature of the sport at the highest levels of national competition. The sport's governing body made an effort to make the game less ethnically oriented. At the same time, rival football codes were intentionally trying to bring in ethnic participants in order to expand their youth playing base.〔 Doping became a concern during the 1980s and more active steps were taken to combat it in Australia in the early 1990s. In 1990, the ''Australian Sports Drug Agency Act 1990'' was passed and took control of doping test away from the Australian Sport Commission and put it into the hands of an independent doping control agency as of 17 February 1991. In 2006, Melbourne hosted the 2006 Commonwealth Games. Later that year, the Australian team competed in the 2006 FIFA World Cup, their second FIFA World Cup appearance after 32 years of failing to qualify for the tournament.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/worldcup/timeline.shtml )〕 In 2010, the rugby league club Melbourne Storm were found to have been systematically breaching the NRL salary cap rules over five years. The club was fined a record Australian sporting fine of $1,689,000, stripped of two premierships and three minor premierships, and prevented from accumulating any premiership points in the 2010 NRL season. In 2012, the Australian Rugby League Commission was formed, bringing to an end the involvement of News Limited in the administration of Rugby League and the media companies' conflict of interests in the sport, finally concluding the fall-out from the Super League war in the 1990s.〔http://www.nrl.com/About/ARLCommission/tabid/10891/Default.aspx〕 From 2008 until 2013, the Australian thoroughbred mare Black Caviar was undefeated in 25 races, a record not equaled in over 100 years. Notable wins include the 2012 Diamond Jubilee Stakes, as well as being named the top sprinter from 2010 to 2012 in the World Thoroughbred Racehorse Rankings and entering the Australian Racing Hall of Fame. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Sport in Australia」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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