Читать книгу Sandow on physical training: a study in the perfect type of the human form - Eugene Sandow - Страница 12

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Sandow, in the ideal perfection of his physical manhood, as he now appears, is a highly interesting and inspiring study for the physiologist and the worshipper of Titanically-developed muscle and thews. His athletic prowess ranks him with the heroes who are credited with doing mighty deeds in the Homeric age. Our modern times have produced no one, it is not too much to say, more perfectly equipped than is this young Prussian, either as an all-round athlete, or as an example of what muscular training can do in developing to perfection the human form and achieving the classical ideal of physical beauty. When, but a few weeks ago, he came to the New World, it might have been supposed—and the hyperbole in the present case is pardonable—that the advance-guard of a new order of physical beings had descended on our planet. Not only the ubiquitous reporter, but native strong men, and even experienced and widely-read physiologists, waxed eloquent in descanting on his points. But Eugene Sandow, on his advent in New York, neither fell romantically from the clouds nor came among us without record of his past doings or passport to public appreciation and favour. Young as he still is, he had been for four years the lion of London, the sensation of the time in the English Provinces, and was known to have been the hero of a hundred wrestling and gladiatorial contests on the Continent of Europe. In these matches he had beaten all competitors and won the hoarsely-shouted acclaim, with the more substantial awards of favour, of the sport-loving populace in the chief pleasure cities of the Old World.