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The French also left their mark on Sports in another way. In 1904 Robert Guérin led a group of football enthusiasts in forming the Fédération Internationale de Football Association , which England’s insular Football Association was at first too arrogant to join. Venationes, which set men against animals, became popular even in the Greek-speaking Eastern Empire, which historians once thought immune from the lust for blood. The greater frequency of chariot races can be explained in part by the fact that they were relatively inexpensive compared with the enormous costs of gladiatorial combat. As early as the late 17th century, quantification became an important aspect of sports, and the cultural basis was created for the concept of the sports record. The word record, in the sense of an unsurpassed quantified achievement, appeared, first in English and then in other languages, late in the 19th century, but the concept went back nearly 200 years. As can be seen in Mughal art of the 16t...