Competitive walkers and runners once drew crowds and staggering wagers: in 1809 Captain Robert Barclay walked one mile in each of 1,000 consecutive hours at Newmarket, with bets reportedly worth 16,000 guineas riding on him. By the 1870s–80s, six-day races packed New York's Madison Square Garden with competitors covering over 500 miles for large purses. Codified amateur athletics and the bicycle boom absorbed its audience, and the trade vanished.
Pedestrian no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
393 – 1850
Patrons, prizes and fairground champions
Paid sport survived the Olympics' end in scattered forms. Medieval tournament knights lived on ransoms and prize money — William Marshal was said to have captured five hundred knights in his career. Tudor courts kept salaried real-tennis masters; eighteenth-century English cricket professionals played for aristocratic patrons' wagers; bare-knuckle prizefighters like James Figg, celebrated as England's first boxing champion from 1719, drew huge crowds. Respectable society enjoyed the spectacle while ranking the performers barely above vagrants.
What else was happening then
1869
Baseball's first openly professional team
The Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first baseball club to pay every player an open, declared salary — shortstop George Wright earned a team-high $1,400 — and toured the United States undefeated that season. Openly buying a whole team scandalized the sporting press and worked so well that a fully professional league followed within two years.
1885
English football legalizes the professional
After years of clubs slipping money into players' boots, the Football Association legalized professionalism in July 1885, largely because northern working-class clubs threatened to break away. The Football League, founded in 1888, built the first modern league season around those salaried players — the template most of the world's team sports still use.
1896
The amateur Olympics revive
Pierre de Coubertin's revived Olympic Games opened in Athens under strict amateurism: anyone who had ever competed for money was barred. The rule policed class as much as commerce — Jim Thorpe was stripped of his 1912 decathlon and pentathlon golds for having played semi-professional baseball at roughly $25 a week; the IOC restored him as sole champion only in 2022.
1926
Ederle swims the Channel
Nineteen-year-old American Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel, in about fourteen and a half hours — nearly two hours faster than the fastest man before her. An estimated two million people lined her New York ticker-tape parade, an early demonstration that a woman athlete could command a mass paying audience.
Where that work lives now
The body as a career: from Olympia's crowned victors to today's global stars, a short, brutal, winner-take-most profession watched by billions.
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