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Languages in Sport (specifically cycling) | ||
Tags: Sports | Multilingual | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5593 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 1 of 8 22 May 2010 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hello one and all,
I wanted to start a thread after rediscovering something I had initially noticed a while back - that is the level of multilingualism in sport - in this case cycling. Now, I know that in every sport we will find individuals who speak multiple languages, but I would suggest that this is largely down to the individuals educational background or indeed a necessity of their professional sport. An example of this might be a manager taking language lessons in order to be able to communicate with his team (hello Fabio Capello). However, what I wanted to discuss here is somewhat different. I am interested in cycling and in the past have been a keen cyclist. Anyone else with this interest may well be aware that at the moment the giro d'italia is in progress. For those that don't know it is one of the 3 grand tours (that is a 3 week long stage race)in the cycling season. Now, I have been watching this online in Italian to kill two birds with one stone, namely getting some listening practise via the Italian commentary whilst enjoying watching the cycling. However, (finally getting to the point) I have noticed that a large number of cyclist appear to be multilingual. I find this very interesting as it seems to be different from the example above in that a culture appears to exist in the professional cycling world where cyclist develop their language skills. This is a practical necessity for teams comprising riders of many nationalities but I think the different between cycling and other sports is that the vast majority of top level racing takes place in mainland europe. I have recently read lance armstrongs autobiography where he briefly mentions that through being a cyclist he had developed his language skills to be able to speak Italian, Spanish, french and some dutch. I watched a russian rider being interviewed the other day (alexander vinokourov) who spoke consecutively in french Italian and russian. A rider like this would have probably come from russia (well, kazakstan in this case) to live in europe to compete in the bigger races and therefore this would point to them picking up different languages through an experience of immersion rather than classroom style lessons (note: cycling is poor sport in contrast to many others, as a side note last year or so I remember hearing (although the figures are probably wrong) that the winner of wimbledon was on something like 5000 euro per hour of particiaption compared to something like 100 euro per hour for the winner of the tour de france). French is the language of cycling. The largest race (more so than a world championships even) is the tour de france. Words like peleton are used for the dscription of a large bunch of riders grouped together. I find it fascinating that the sport I like to watch has within in it a culture embedded that demands its participants to learn different languages. Of course, there are plenty of riders who don't speak multiple languages for whatever reason but I would say overall, there is a higher level of multlingualism than in any other sport I can think of. I wonder what other people think of this, do you follow cycling or another sport where knowledge of different languages is high amongst competitors? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| global_gizzy Senior Member United States maxcollege.blogspot. Joined 5703 days ago 275 posts - 310 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 8 22 May 2010 at 10:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I never paid much attention but I doubt it. Most of the sports I watch: American Football, Little League soccer, American football and such, are all strictly in English.
I dont have the patience to watch the Olympics any more, but I guess the Olympics is where most people have translators because each team reps a nation so I guess multilingual PROFICIENCY is not really an issue. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| FrenchLanguage Senior Member Germany Joined 5736 days ago 122 posts - 135 votes | Message 3 of 8 23 May 2010 at 12:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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"that the winner of wimbledon
was on something like 5000 euro per hour of particiaption compared to something like 100 euro per hour for the winner of the tour de france)." You have to keep in mind that in order to get this kind of pay, they still have to practice/train for those events 24-7 to compete on a very high level. Their income should be compared by hour of..."sum of training hours + competition hours". Still, Im surprised the tour de france winner would get only 100 euros/hour? Wondering how that would change, in case sponsoring (exp? I mean..companies paying them to create brand awareness) was taken into consideration, too. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 budonoseito Pro Member United States budobeyondtechnRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5805 days ago 261 posts - 344 votes Studies: French, Japanese Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 8 23 May 2010 at 5:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think the American cyclists learn more languages out of necessity. They spend most of
the year in Europe. So just from immersion, they will pick up some. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| LtM Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5860 days ago 130 posts - 223 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 5 of 8 11 June 2010 at 6:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Not sure if this will be useful to anyone, but the below appeared in the latest "Sprachberatung" from Duden.
German football terms: centre forward = Mittelstürmer corner-kick = Eckball draw = Unentschieden drop-out = Abstoß forward = Stürmer foul = ungehörig, unehrlich free-kick = Freistoß goal = Tor, Mal goal-line = Mallinie (Torlinie) goal-post = Torpfosten, Malstange half time = Halbzeit kick-off = Anstoß linesmen = Linienrichter 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| genini1 Senior Member United States Joined 5468 days ago 114 posts - 161 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 8 13 June 2010 at 7:31am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've always wanted to know how the players in the world cup are always able to argue with the ref, you would think that with the number of countries and the huge number of languages that the language barrier would be impressive. They also seem to be able to at the very least insult the other team (if anyone knows what language Zidane was insulted in, in the 2006 world cup against Italy I'd be grateful to know.)
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7015 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 8 13 June 2010 at 11:32am | IP Logged | |||||
Probably English.
I don't know for sure, but he probably speaks Italian since he played for Juventus for five years. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| JacobJuul Bilingual Diglot Newbie Denmark Joined 5244 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: English*, Danish* Studies: Italian | Message 8 of 8 08 August 2010 at 3:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hello, this is my first post on this forum.
This is an interesting topic to me, since I'm a semi-professional cyclist. This is the main reason that I want to learn Italian. I contemplated wether I should learn French instead, but I found it so boring in school, that I would rather just start fresh on a new language. Italian is also a very good language to know as a cyclist, as well as Spanish, French, Dutch, German and English of course. However, I think more cyclists spoke multiple languages back in the 90's and earlier. With the numerous English speaking teams that have emerged in the later years, there's really not a BIG need to speak more than English. Back in the 90's there weren't really that many English speaking teams - most were French, Italian, Spanish or Belgian or Dutch. Edited by JacobJuul on 08 August 2010 at 3:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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