This title is suitable for children of ages 4 to 8 years. Keep the Olympic spirit alive! Children can learn all about the Winter Olympic Sports and catch the spirit with these highly motivational and fun-to-read Easy Olympic Sports Readers. These colourful and exciting books represent six of the most popular winter sports: Sledding, Skiing, Figure Skating, Speed Skating, Ice Hockey, Snowboarding. With such enticing subjects, beginning readers will visit their favourite sports often while learning how to read.

In the early 1970s, the athletes of the German Democratic Republic started to achieve incredible sports results, winning medals and setting new world records with astonishing frequency. For many years, their sporting supremacy was hailed as a triumph of the socialist government's commitment to scientific research and innovative training methods. But after the Cold War ended, the Stasi archives revealed a sinister secret behind the successes: a perverse doping system imposed by the government itself. Drugs were administered to young athletes, often without their consent, and the price their bodies are now paying is very high, both physically and mentally. Through the athletes' personal stories, Synthetic Medals reveals the events that led to the discovery of the state-doping system and the subsequent trial. It also explores the state's motives for this crime against its own people - people who were sacrificed on the altar of a distorted ideology, for the simple purpose of achieving glory on the international chessboard.

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.

The 2008 Olympic Games will be held in Beijing, but many human rights activists support a boycott. They liken the circumstances to previous governments that used the games to glorify their regimes--most notoriously the Nazis in 1936. What has led to this perception and is it fair? "Sport, Revolution and the Beijing Olympics" is a cultural history of sport in China that challenges many such ingrained Western assumptions. The authors unpick the relationship of sport to imperialism and revolution and examine its significance in both China and Taiwan at governmental and everyday levels. In the process they successfully debunk harmful myths, such as the prevalence of drugs in Chinese sport among women athletes, and present a balanced view that is a much-needed corrective to popular understanding.

The 1936 Olympic Games played a key role in the development of both Hitler's Third Reich and international sporting competition. This volume gathers original essays by modern scholars from the Games' most prominent participating countries and lays out the issues--sporting as well as political--Surrounding individual nations' involvement. The Nazi Olympics opens with an analysis of Germany's preparations for the Games and the attempts by the Nazi regime to allay the international concerns about Hitler's racist ideals and expansionist ambitions. Essays follow on the United States, Great Britain, and France--three first-class Olympian nations with misgivings about participation--as well as German ally Italy and future ally Japan. Other essays examine the issues at stake in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands, which opposed Hitler's politics, despite embodying his Aryan ideal. Challenging the view of sport as a trivial pursuit, this collection reveals exactly how high the political stakes were in 1936 and how the Nazi Olympics distilled many of the critical geopolitical issues of the time into a contest that was anything but trivial.

This book deals with the events leading up to the 1936 Popular Olympics which would have united the Popular Front in opposition to the Berlin Olympics. It also discusses the days after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War which began on the same day the games were due to start. Using a variety of primary and secondary sources, the book traces the biographies of several Popular Olympians who would go on to volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. The book also examines the planned events and locations for the Popular Olympics as well as the international funding that the games secured. The book argues that the events were a departure from Workers' Sport as well as the IOC's Olympic games and represented an important cultural manifestation of the Popular Front.

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).

This book critically examines the planning, management, and operations of the world's premier event for Para sport athletes. Noting a lack of research into how these games are planned and managed, the authors of this contributed volume discuss how the Paralympics are essentially different to the Olympics and what this means for their management. Managing the Paralympics explores how the organizers and connected stakeholders effectively organize and deliver the Paralympics, taking into account what has been learned from previous events. Including emergent models of best practice from event management, project management and sport management literature, the book gives an insight into the planning of one of the world's biggest sporting events that encompasses ten impairment types and multiple sport classes within sports.

This text is written as a celebratory publication in the 50th year of Jamaican independence; the manuscript contains fifty, 400 word biographies on the greatest sporting icons Jamaica has to offer.

Kaitlin Sandeno was one of the world's greatest and most versatile swimmers. Competing at the 2000 and 2004 Olympics, she was a part of the world record breaking 4x200-meter relay team and is one of an elite few to medal in three different strokes. In Golden Glow: How Kaitlin Sandeno Achieved Gold in the Pool and in Life, Dan D'Addona recounts Sandeno's amazing swimming career, including her spectacular Olympic performances, and details the impact she has made in the world outside the pool. Breaking into the Olympics at seventeen years old, she became the face of the team with her enthusiasm and bubbly personality. She returned to the Olympics four years later to have one of the most dominating meets by an American woman in history. But Sandeno's legacy in the pool is nothing compared to how she has used her platform to help those around her. She is the national spokesperson for the Jessie Rees Foundation and spreads joy around the country to children with cancer. She has emceed Olympic trials, hosted multiple shows for USA Swimming, and has given back to her sport, working for USA Swimming and coaching youth teams. Golden Glow is not only the story of how hard work and perseverance led Sandeno to Olympic gold, but also how she has used her success in the pool to inspire those around her.

American photographers John Huet and David Burnett were commissioned by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to create a personal record ofthe Olympic Games in their own way; these new books are the result of that freedom and artistry. They capture the essence and adventure of the Olympic Games through stunning and unconventional photographs.David Burnett is the co-founder of Contact Press Images in New York. He covered the Vietnam War as a staff photographer for "Life "magazine.John Huet is a sports photographer and a director of commercials. His book "Soul of the Game: Images and Voices of Street Basketball "was published to critical acclaim in 1997."

In the second half of the twentieth century, the Olympics played an important role in the politics of the Cold War and was part of the conflicts between the Capitalist Block, the Socialist Block and Third World countries. The Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO) is one of the best examples of the politicization of sport and the Olympics in the Cold War era. From the 1980s onward, the Olympics has facilitated communication and cooperation between nations in the post-Cold War era and contributed to the formation of a new world order. In August 2016, the Games of the XXXI Olympiad were held in Rio de Janeiro, making Brazil the first South American country to host the Summer Olympics. This was widely regarded as a new landmark event in the history of the modern Olympic movement. From the GANEFO to Rio, the Olympic Games have witnessed the shifting balance in international politics and world economy. This book aims at understanding the transformation of the Olympics over the past decades and tries to explain how the Olympic movement played its part in world politics, the world economy and international relations against the background of the rise of developing countries. The chapters in this book were published as a special issue in The International Journal of the History of Sport.

The Olympic Movement began with the Ancient Olympic Games, which were held in Greece on the Peloponnesus peninsula at Olympia, Greece. It is not clear why the Greeks instituted this quadrennial celebration in the form of an athletic festival. The recorded history of the Ancient Olympic Games begins in 776 B.C., although it is suspected that the Games had been held for several centuries by that time. The Games were conducted as religious celebrations in honor of the god Zeus, and it is known that Olympia was a shrine to Zeus from about 1000 B.C. In modern time The Olympic Movement attempts to bring all the nations of the world together in a series of multisport festivals, the Olympic Games, seeking to use sport as a means to promote internationalism and peace. This fifth edition of Historical Dictionary of The Olympic Movement covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on the history, philosophy, and politics of the Olympics, major organizations, the various sports, the participating countries, and especially the athletes. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about The Olympic Movement.

How one man brought the Olympics to Los Angeles, fueling the city's urban transformation. Dreamers and Schemers chronicles how Los Angeles's pursuit and staging of the 1932 Olympic Games during the depths of the Great Depression helped fuel the city's transformation from a seedy frontier village to a world-famous metropolis. Leading that pursuit was the "Prince of Realtors," William May (Billy) Garland, a prominent figure in early Los Angeles. In important respects, the story of Billy Garland is the story of Los Angeles. After arriving in Southern California in 1890, he and his allies drove much of the city's historic expansion in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Then, from 1920 to 1932, he directed the city's bid for the 1932 Olympic Games. Garland's quest to host the Olympics provides an unusually revealing window onto a particular time, place, and way of life. Reconstructing the narrative from Garland's visionary notion to its consequential aftermath, Barry Siegel shows how one man's grit and imagination made California history.

Beyond the realm of sports and spectacle, states host the Olympic Games for political, social, and cultural reasons. In particular, organizers have used the Olympics as an opportunity to redefine and reassert their national identities through performance. The hosts present an artistic rendering of their national identity to domestic and international audiences through the pageantry of the opening and closing ceremonies. Nationalism on the World Stage examines the relationship between nationalism and the Olympics by weaving together current understandings of nationalism and applying these notions to displays of national identity at Olympic ceremonies from 1980 to 2006. Using tactics such as historical revision, indoctrination, and custodianship, hosts of the Games have re-told their official state identities and histories through performances. Through examples including the United States, Canada, Norway, Russia, Spain, and Japan, Philip A. D'Agati establishes a new scope of nationalism, cultural performance, and international festival and provides new insights into studies of nationalism.

The Olympics: A Critical Reader represents a unique, critical guide to the definitive sporting mega-event and the wider phenomenon it represents - Olympism. Combining classic texts and thoughtful editorial discussion with challenging new pieces, including previously unseen material, the book systematically addresses the key questions in modern Olympism, including: what does studying Olympism entail? how do historical accounts create and challenge Olympic myths? how do different theoretical perspectives inform our understanding of Olympism? which socio-political processes influence personal, collective and imagined Olympic identities? how do we experience and make sense of Olympism? who owns Olympism and why does it matter? how do cities compete for and celebrate the Olympics? How are the Olympic values promoted? why is it important to protect the ethical principles and properties of Olympism? what are the grounds for contesting Olympism? how can Olympism be taught? how can the principles and practices of Olympism be sustained in the future? Each thematic part has been designed to include a range of views, including background treatment of an issue as well as critical scholarship, to ensure that students develop a well-rounded understanding of the Olympic phenomenon. The Olympics: A Critical Reader is essential reading for students of the Olympics and Olympism, the sociology of sport, sport management and cultural studies.

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.

Over the years, host countries and cities have had to deal with a variety of concerns, problems, or criticisms, and Rio de Janeiro is no exception. Separately or collectively, a variety of issues might pose risks to the health, safety, and general well-being of athletes and their families, team personnel, and spectators participating in or attending the 2016 Games. Chief among these are the Zika virus, public safety threats, security concerns, and environmental conditions. This book also discusses the possible implications of hosting the Olympics for Brazil and the issue of doping.

This book is a comprehensive examination of Olympic victor lists. The origins, development, content, and structure of Olympic victor lists are explored and explained, and a number of important questions, such as the source and reliability of the year of 776 for the first Olympics, are addressed. Olympic victor lists emerge as a clearly defined type of literature that is best understood as a group of closely related texts. This book offers a fresh perspective on works by familiar writers such as Diodorus Siculus and a sense of the potential importance of less-well-known authors such as Phlegon of Tralleis.

Located in the United States, NBC (National Broadcasting Company) is the biggest and most powerful Olympic network in the world, having won the rights to televise both the Summer and the Winter Olympic Games. By way of attracting more viewers of both sexes and all ages and ethnicities than any other sporting event, and through the production of breathtaking spectacles and absorbing stories, NBC's Olympic telecasts have huge power and potential to shape viewer perceptions. Billings's unique text examines the production, content, and potential effects of NBC's Olympic telecasts. Interviews with key NBC Olympic producers and sportscasters (including NBC Universal Sports and Olympics President Dick Ebersol and primetime anchor Bob Costas) outline the inner workings of the NBC Olympic machine; content analyses from ten years of Olympic telecasts (1996-2006) examine the portrayal of nationality, gender, and ethnicity within NBC's telecast; and survey analyses interrogate the extent to which NBC's storytelling process affects viewer beliefs about identity issues. This mixed-method approach offers valuable insights into what Billings portrays as "the biggest show on television".

"In her excellent new book, Amy Bass uses the famous 'black power' podium salute by sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith as the centerpiece of her expansive examination of the black athlete in America." -Boston Globe

"Amy Bass's powerful and nuanced account of the Olympic Project for Human Rights gives us the story behind this picture-a story that will change our conception of the history of sport and racial politics." -Robin D. G. Kelley

"Beautifully written, as well as appropriately complex and wide-ranging. As much as sports might appear to be a straight-ahead business, where the 'best' might be rightly rewarded, Bass deftly reveals the difficulties of maintaining a sense of self, collective consciousness, and political urgency." -Philadelphia City Paper

"Amy Bass sorts through the events and perceptions linked to some of the biggest names and moments in sports history and assesses their meaning beyond the playing field." -Bob Costas

Amy Bass is assistant professor of history at the College of New Rochelle and is a member of the NBC research team covering the Olympic Games including Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000, Salt Lake 2002, and Athens 2004.

The Beijing Olympics will be remembered as the largest, most expensive, and most widely watched event of the modern Olympic era. But did China present itself as a responsible host and an emergent international power, much like Japan during the 1964 Tokyo Games and Korea during the 1988 Seoul Games? Or was Beijing in 2008 more like Berlin in 1936, when Germany took advantage of the global spotlight to promote its political ideology at home and abroad?

"Beyond the Final Score" is one of the first books to look at the 2008 Beijing games within the context of the politics of sport in Asia. Asian athletics are bound up with notions of national identity and nationalism, refracting political intent and the process of globalization. Sporting events can generate diplomatic breakthroughs (as with the results of Nixon and Mao's "ping-pong diplomacy") or breakdowns (as when an athlete defects to another country). For China, the Beijing Games introduced a liberalizing ethos that its authoritative regime could ignore only at its peril. Victor D. Cha& mdash;former director of Asian affairs for the White House& mdash;evaluates Beijing's contention with this pressure considering the intense scrutiny China already faced on issues of counterproliferation, global warming, and free trade. He begins with the theoretical arguments tying Asian sport to international affairs and follows with an explanation of athletics as they relate to identity, diplomacy, and transformation. Enhanced by Cha's remarkable facility with the history and politics of sport, "Beyond the Final Score" is the definitive examination of the significance of events& mdash;both good and bad& mdash;that took place during the BeijingOlympics.