Cardiological Observations at the Sixth British Empire and Commonwealth Games

The staging of the Sixth British Empire and Commonwealth Games at Cardiff in 1958 presented the opportunity for extension of an electrocardiographic study of the normal young man to include the changes that might result from intensive athletic training. A previous investigation (Jordan and Beswick, 1958) designed to establish the limits of normality for cardiac spatial electrical phenomena, as recorded by an orthogonal lead system based on the lead field theory of McFee and Johnston (1953, 1954a and b), had shown that, while about 85 per cent of normal subjects constituted a com- pact homogeneous population, the remainder demonstrated individual characteristics. It was, therefore, of interest to determine whether, or to what extent, a population of first-class athletes differed from the untrained both as a group and in the incidence of individual peculiarities.