Introduction

While building businesses and railroads, engaging in mining and farming, or otherwise making their way as immigrants in a new land, colonists also found time for sport. By doing so, colonists helped to develop new cultural and athletic institutions in Chile; far more than simply an activity to pass the time, sport also built bridges to connect foreigners back to their homeland while simultaneously forging new links between colonists and their hosts. 

But the athletic activities brought by the British to Chile were certainly not unmixed blessings. These imported sports in some cases supplanted and in other cases altered the indigenous activities already in place. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, British and Chilean sports merged to become part of the nation’s identity.

In this exhibit, we will examine British influence on Chilean sporting culture.