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Architects in Enjoyment: Fun and Politics in the Swedish Cycling Experience, 1918–39

Title / Series / Name
The International Journal of the History of Sport
Publication Volume
39
Publication Issue
7
Pages
Editors
Keywords
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/13889
Abstract
Interwar Swedish cycling offers an opportunity to consider the relationship between fun and politics in sport. A collection of sources which reveals that light-hearted fun was central to the experience of cycling, whether through enjoying the landscape, adventuring abroad, or cycling with friends and family, also shows that cycling was connected intricately to the policies of the Swedish Social Democratic Worker’s Party (SAP). The SAP programme unlocked cycling for swathes of Swedes, but, more profoundly, enjoying riding a bike also helped to foster new attitudes and behaviours which converged with SAP policies. Simply having fun when cycling encouraged new approaches to nature and travel abroad, and new patterns of sociability, which made cyclists architects, together with the SAP and other leisure time and outdoor organisations, in constructing the new type of society that emerged in interwar Sweden.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2022
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1080/09523367.2022.2106973
Publisher link
Unit