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Books > Sport & Leisure > Sports & outdoor recreation > Sporting events, tours & organisations > Olympic games
Do the Olympic Games really live up to their glowing reputation? As
the biggest global sport mega-event, the Olympics command public
attention, while Olympic mythology obscures their underlying
function as a profit-making business. Unlike terms such as 'Olympic
movement' and 'Olympic family', the concept of 'Olympic industry'
focuses on sport as an economic and political enterprise, with its
beneficiaries including sponsors, media rights holders, developers,
and politicians. Negative impacts on host cities disproportionately
threaten the lives and well-being of disadvantaged minorities.
Citizens' Olympic resistance campaigns address a range of human
rights abuses, while recent athlete activism also focuses on the
doping problem and the sexual abuse of girls and women. Female
athletes with 'differences of sexual development' face
discriminatory gender policies that disqualify them from women's
events. All of these issues are analysed through a feminist,
anti-racist lens.
Seoul Glow tells the story of the Great Britain men's hockey team
who won gold at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Little to the team's
knowledge, the final caught the British public's imagination as
they beat rivals West Germany in the gold-medal match. After Sean
Kerly's semi-final heroics and Imran Sherwani's double in the
final, BBC commentator Barry Davies uttered the now infamous line:
'Where were the Germans? But, frankly, who cares?' Victory, for a
team of amateurs, who had either quit their jobs or taken holiday
to play in Seoul, propelled the team to celebratory heights on
their return to British shores; it was GB's first hockey gold in
the post-war era and followed an eight-year plan for a major title.
The story also reveals how the team was inspirationally led by the
late Roger Self, the manager who gelled his players into Olympic
title holders.
In 1968, Mexico prepared to host the Olympic games amid growing
civil unrest. The spectacular sports facilities and urban
redevelopment projects built by the government in Mexico City
mirrored the country's rapid but uneven modernization. In the same
year, a street-savvy democratization movement led by students
emerged in the city. Throughout the summer, the '68 Movement staged
protests underscoring a widespread sense of political
disenfranchisement. Just ten days before the Olympics began, nearly
three hundred student protestors were massacred by the military in
a plaza at the core of a new public housing complex. In spite of
institutional denial and censorship, the 1968 massacre remains a
touchstone in contemporary Mexican culture thanks to the public
memory work of survivors and Mexico's leftist intelligentsia. In
this highly original study of the afterlives of the '68 Movement,
George F. Flaherty explores how urban spaces-material but also
literary, photographic, and cinematic-became an archive of 1968,
providing a framework for de facto modes of justice for years to
come.
The Olympic Games produce an untold number of breathtaking images:
athletes at work and rest, events from ski-jumping and
bobsleighing, sporting facilities, venues from rugged mountains to
indoor ice-rinks, and unique moments that allow the viewer to share
the passion of the Olympic Games. This fourth volume in a series
celebrating the Olympic Games presents stunning photographs from
the Winter Games in PyeongChang 2018. Photographers John Huet,
David Burnett, Jason Evans and Mine Kasapoglu Puhrer were granted
access to the training zones and accompanied the athletes as they
prepared for their events before the arrival of the crowds. These
unconventional images show the intensity of training and the mental
state of the Olympians. The photos are accompanied by detailed
commentaries by the photographers, describing the thought and
planning behind the images, and the exact moment when the images
were captured. Bilingual edition (English and French).
For two weeks in August 1936, Nazi Germany achieved an astonishing
propaganda coup when it staged the Olympic Games in Berlin. Hiding
their anti-Semitism and plans for territorial expansion, the Nazis
exploited the Olympic ideal, dazzling visiting spectators and
journalists alike with an image of a tolerant country. Thousands of
foreigners went away wondering why the Hitler regime had been
vilified, unaware that not far from the stunning Olympic Stadium
lay a concentration camp full of 'enemies of the state'. In
Hitler's Olympics, Anton Rippon tells the story of those remarkable
Games, the first to overtly use the Olympic festival for political
purposes. His account looks at how the rise of the Nazis affected
German sportsmen and women in the early 1930s. And it reveals how
the rest of the world allowed the Berlin Olympics to go ahead
despite the knowledge that Nazi Germany was a police state.The
Nazis threw all their resources into staging the most remarkable
Olympics seen so far. Hitler was closely involved in the grandiose
planning of an event that was designed to glorify the new Nazi
state, and this book describes the process in fascinating detail.
The political drama of the event is matched by the intense
competition of the athletes on the field and track. Here the two
sides of the story come together, most famously in the person of
Jessie Owens, the black quadruple gold medal winner.Hitler's
Olympics is featured on the Sports Journalists' Association
website:www.sportsjournalists.co.uk/olympics/should-we-send-a-jew-to-cover-the-berlin-olympics/
This book provides a unique perspective on the behind the scenes
planning of London's Olympic legacy. The author had unprecedented
access to the legacy organisations, institutions, and individuals
involved with the 2012 Games. This has allowed her, in a highly
accessible and engaging style, to capture a sense of the unfolding
drama as attempts were made in London to harness the juggernaut of
Olympic development, and its commercial imperative, to the broader
cause of meaningful post-industrial regeneration in East London.
The book argues that London will become the test-case city against
which the legacies of all future Olympic Games, and other sporting
mega-events, will be judged. The author provides the first in-depth
case study of a mega-event legacy planning operation, and sets out
a constructive conclusion, which details the lessons to be learnt
from London's experience. Exploring the relationship between mega
event planning, and post-industrial urban regeneration, this book
will appeal to scholars across Sociology, Sport and Olympic
studies, Anthropology, Urban Studies and Geography as well as
policymakers and practitioners in urban and sport planning.
Once a showcase for amateur athletics, the Olympic Games have
become a global entertainment colossus powered by corporate
sponsorship and professional participation. Stephen R. Wenn and
Robert K. Barney offer the inside story of this transformation by
examining the far-sighted leadership and decision-making acumen of
four International Olympic Committee (IOC) presidents: Avery
Brundage, Lord Killanin, Juan Antonio Samaranch, and Jacques Rogge.
Blending biography with historical storytelling, the authors
explore the evolution of Olympic commercialism from Brundage's
uneasy acceptance of television rights fees through the revenue
generation strategies that followed the Salt Lake City bid scandal
to the present day. Throughout, Wenn and Barney draw on their
decades of studying Olympic history to dissect the personalities,
conflicts, and controversies behind the Games' embrace of the
business of spectacle. Entertaining and expert, The Gold in the
Rings maps the Olympics' course from paragon of purity to
billion-dollar profits.
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