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 is a true story. What is the ultimate price of success? In 1924, swimming superstar Hilda James was a dead cert for the British Team at the Paris Olympics. Her family had other ideas. This is the account of a World Champion who suddenly found that her ultimate challenge was to pull her life back together after her dream was cruelly shattered forever. Hilda wasn't about to bow down to anybody and broke away, finally achieving full emancipation. A social history of life in South Liverpool plus the story of Parkgate Baths on The Wirral provide the early background for this extraordinary book. The final chapters are set against the backdrop of life as a celebrity crewmember aboard Cunard's first purpose built cruise liner, Carinthia.

It is said the champions of the ancient Olympic Games received a crown of olive leaves, symbolizing a divine blessing from Nike, the winged goddess of victory. While the mythology of the ancient games has come to exemplify the highest political, religious, community, and individual ideals of the time, the modern Olympic Games, by comparison, are widely known as an international, bi-annual sporting event where champions have the potential to earn not only glory for their country, but lucrative endorsement deals and the perks of worldwide fame. The Olympics and Philosophy examines the Olympic Movement from a variety of theoretical perspectives to uncover the connection between athleticism and philosophy for a deeper appreciation of the Olympic Pillars of Sport, Environment, and Culture. While today's Olympic champions are neither blessed by the gods nor rewarded with wreaths of olive, the original spirit and ancient ideals of the Olympic Movement endure in its modern embodiment. Editors Heather L. Reid and Michael W. Austin have assembled a team of international scholars to explore topics such as the concept of excellence, ethics, doping, gender, and race. Interweaving ancient and modern Olympic traditions, The Olympics and Philosophy considers the philosophical implications of the Games' intersection with historical events and modern controversy in a unique analysis of tradition and the future of the Olympiad.

The Olympics have a checkered, sometimes scandalous, political history. Jules Boykoff, a former US Olympic team member, takes readers from the event's nineteenth-century origins, through the Games' flirtation with Fascism, and into the contemporary era of corporate control. Along the way he recounts vibrant alt-Olympic movements, such as the Workers' Games and Women's Games of the 1920s and 1930s as well as athlete-activists and political movements that stood up to challenge the Olympic machine.

When Canada hosted the 1976 Montreal Olympics, few Canadian spectators waved flags in the stands. By 2010, in the run-up to the Vancouver Olympics, thousands of Canadians wore red mittens with white maple leaves on the palms. In doing so, they turned their hands into miniature flags that flew with even a casual wave. Red Mitten Nationalism investigates this shift in Canadians' displays of patriotism by exploring how common understandings of Canadian history and identity are shaped at the intersection of sport, commercialism, and nationalism. Through case studies of recent Canadian-hosted Olympic and Commonwealth Games, Estee Fresco argues that representations of Indigenous Peoples' cultures are central to the way everyday Canadians, corporations, and sport organizations remember the past and understand the present. Corporate sponsors and games organizers highlight selective ideas about the nation's identity, and unacknowledged truths about the history and persistence of Settler colonialism in Canada haunt the commercial and cultural features of these sporting events. Commodities that represent the nation - from disposable trinkets to carefully curated objects of nostalgia - are not uncomplicated symbols of national pride, but rather reminders that Canada is built on Indigenous land and Settlers profit from its natural resources. Red Mitten Nationalism challenges readers to re-evaluate how Canadians use sport and commercial practices to express their patriotism and to understand the impact of this expression on the current state of Indigenous-Settler relations.

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.

A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year The Games is best-selling sportswriter David Goldblatt's sweeping, definitive history of the modern Olympics. Goldblatt brilliantly traces their history from the reinvention of the Games in Athens in 1896 to Rio in 2016, revealing how the Olympics developed into a global colossus and highlighting how they have been buffeted by (and affected by) domestic and international conflicts. Along the way, Goldblatt reveals the origins of beloved Olympic traditions (winners' medals, the torch relay, the eternal flame) and popular events (gymnastics, alpine skiing, the marathon). And he delivers memorable portraits of Olympic icons from Jesse Owens to Nadia Comaneci, the Dream Team to Usain Bolt.

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.

Original, contemporary haiku celebrating the sports and athletes of the Olympics - from an acclaimed poet and an international gallery of guests. Award-winning haiku poet Kit Pancoast Nagamura offers a collection of original poems that explore the beauty, physical effort, and essence of all the sports of the summer Olympics. In this volume, the first to cover such a wide range of athletics, each Olympic sport is represented by three haiku written by Nagamura, plus one or two by a guest poet. Each poem is presented in both English and Japanese. Evocative photographs and illustrations complement the text.

The Berlin Olympics, August 14, 1936. German rowers, dominant at the Games, line up against America's top eight-oared crew. Hundreds of millions of listeners worldwide wait by their radios. Leni Riefenstahl prepares her cameramen. Grantland Rice looks past the 75,000 spectators crowding the riverbank. Above it all, the Nazi leadership, flush with the propaganda triumph the Olympics have given their New Germany, await a crowning victory they can broadcast to the world. The Berlin Games matched cutting-edge communication technology with compelling sports narrative to draw the blueprint for all future sports broadcasting. A global audience--the largest cohort of humanity ever assembled--enjoyed the spectacle via radio. This still-novel medium offered a "liveness," a thrilling immediacy no other technology had ever matched. Michael J. Socolow's account moves from the era's technological innovations to the human drama of how the race changed the lives of nine young men. As he shows, the origins of global sports broadcasting can be found in this single, forgotten contest. In those origins we see the ways the presentation, consumption, and uses of sport changed forever.

This book focuses on the ground-breaking coverage of the London 2012 Paralympic Games by the UK's publicly owned but commercially funded Channel 4 network, coverage which seemed to deliver a transformational shift in attitudes towards people with disabilities. It sheds important new light on our understanding of media production and its complex interactions with sport and wider society. Drawing on political economy and cultural studies, the book explores why and how a marginalised group was brought into the mainstream by the media, and the key influencing factors and decision-making processes. Featuring interviews with key people involved in the television and digital production structures, as well as organisational archives, it helps us to understand the interplay between creativity and commerce, between editorial and marketing workflows, and about the making of meaning. The book also looks at coverage of the Rio Paralympics, and ahead to the Tokyo Games, and at changing global perceptions of disability through sport. This is fascinating reading for any advanced students, researchers, or sport management or media professionals looking to better understand the media production process or the significance of sport and disability in wider society.

If you don't recall the 1976 Denver Olympic Games, it's because they never happened. The Mile-High City won the right to host the winter games and then was forced by Colorado citizens to back away from its successful Olympic bid through a statewide ballot initiative. Adam Berg details the powerful Colorado regime that gained the games for Denver and the grassroots activism that brought down its Olympic dreams, and he explores the legacy of this milestone moment for the games and politics in the United States. The ink was hardly dry on Denver's host agreement when Mexican American and African American urbanites, white middle-class environmentalists, and fiscally concerned local politicians realized opposition to the Olympics provided them new political openings. The Olympics quickly became a platform for taking stands on a range of issues, from conservation to urban livability to the very idea of growth, which for decades had been unquestioned in Colorado. The Olympics That Never Happened argues that hostility to the Olympics galvanized and empowered diverse citizens in a major US city, with long-term ramifications for Colorado and political activism elsewhere. The Olympics themselves were changed forever, compelling organizers to take seriously competing interests from subgroups within their communities.

Something in the Air is Richard Hoffer's gripping sports narrative that tells the individual stories of the athletes who gathered in Mexico City in 1968, a year of dramatic upheaval around the world. Racial tensions were high on the U.S. Olympic team, where inflamed black athletes had to choose between demands for justice, on the one hand, and loyalty to country, on the other. Although basketball star Lew Alcindor (later to become the great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) decided not to participate, heavyweight boxer George Foreman not only competed and won a gold medal but waved a miniature American flag at foreign judges. Sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos became as famous for their raised-fist gestures of protest as for their speed on the track. No one was prepared for Bob Beamon's long jump, which broke the world record by a staggering twenty-two inches. And then there was Dick Fosbury, the goofball high jumper whose backward, upside-down approach to the bar (the "Fosbury Flop") baffled his coaches while breaking records. Filled with human drama, Something in the Air is a powerful, unforgettable tale that will resonate with sports fans and readers of social history alike. This edition features a new afterword by the author on the fiftieth anniversary of the Olympics.

Can sports and politics mix? They can and do, according to the author of this study of the Olympic Games. Richard Espy's objective is to show how the organization of the Games reflects the structure of international politics. He focuses on four basic issues concerning the Olympic system during the post-World War II period: German participation; Chinese participation; South African and Rhodesia participation; and the role of sport federations, international organizations, and business interests in the Olympics. Espy discusses the relationship between the Olympic idea of international amity through sport competition and the reality of world affairs, how television has changed governmental views and use of the Olympic Games, and whether sports can be used legitimately as a political tool. He also recommends possible changes in the organizational structure of the event-or even the Olympic ideal itself-to help the Games achieve their intended result: an atmosphere of international good will. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979, followed by a paperback in 1981.

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.

Growing up in Maplewood, New Jersey the only Black, Muslim-American in hijab, in middle school Ibtihaj discovered fencing, a sport traditionally reserved for the wealthy and elite. Though she would start fencing later than most at 12 years old, she had an undeniable talent-the sort that would soon put her on the international stage. But Ibtihaj saw something more in her Olympic journey: an opportunity to take action, to stand up and make a Muslim-American woman of color impossible to ignore. Ibtihaj's path to Olympic greatness has been marked with hateful opposition and near-debilitating challenges-bigotry from teammates at Duke University and Team USA, death threats, and social hardships as a Muslim-American. In Proud, her exhilarating emergence from young outsider to national hero and outspoken activist is a timeless, uniquely American tale of hard work, determination, and resilience that hasn't been told.

For readers of Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit" and "Unbroken," the dramatic story of the American rowing team that stunned the world at Hitler's 1936 Berlin Olympics
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"Daniel James Brown's robust book tells the story of the University of Washington's 1936 eight-oar crew and their epic quest for an Olympic gold medal, a team that transformed the sport and grabbed the attention of millions of Americans. The sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the boys defeated elite rivals first from eastern and British universities and finally the German crew rowing for Adolf Hitler in the Olympic games in Berlin, 1936.
The emotional heart of the story lies with one rower, Joe Rantz, a teenager without family or prospects, who rows not for glory, but to regain his shattered self-regard and to find a place he can call home. The crew is assembled by an enigmatic coach and mentored by a visionary, eccentric British boat builder, but it is their trust in each other that makes them a victorious team. They remind the country of what can be done when everyone quite literally pulls together--a perfect melding of commitment, determination, and optimism.
Drawing on the boys' own diaries and journals, their photos and memories of a once-in-a-lifetime shared dream, "The Boys in the Boat "is an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times--the improbable, intimate story of nine working-class boys from the American west who, in the depths of the Great Depression, showed the world what true grit really meant. It will appeal to readers of Erik Larson, Timothy Egan, James Bradley, and David Halberstam's "The Amateurs."

"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 Olympics' Strangest Moments recounts the bizarre, controversial, heroic and plain unlucky from the first modern games in 1896 to the return of the games to their birthplace in Athens in 2004. The Olympics' Strangest Moments recounts the bizarre, controversial, inept, heroic and plain unlucky from the first modern games in 1896 to the return of the games to their birthplace in Athens in 2004 and up to the Beijing 2008 games. The world's greatest sporting occasion has been packed with unusual occurrences as well as creating unlikely heroes such as Dorando Pietri, who missed out on marathon gold after being helped over the finish line by over-anxious officials, and ''Eric the Eel'' from Equatorial Guinea who was acknowledged as the slowest swimmer in the history of the games.

The quadrennial summer Olympic Games is the biggest festival of sport on the planet, creating instant heroes and gallant losers, to say nothing of iconic moments of triumph and glory. Published in association with the official Olympic Museum in Lausanne, a foundation of the International Olympic Committee, The Treasures of the Olympic Games brings to life, through more than 200 photographs and 20 removable artifacts, the glorious history of the summer Olympic Games illustrating the Olympic values that unite the world through sport every four years. Beginning in 776 BC in ancient Greece through to its revival in 1896 and the 24 subsequent modern games, this exceptional new title beautifully charts the event's absorbing and exemplary history and a wealth of world sporting achievement. A book of dreams, this is the first time that the Olympic Museum have co-operated in producing an interactive book containing facsimiles of rare historical documents from their exclusive archive, allowing readers to get closer to the world's greatest sporting spectacle than has ever been possible before. The Treasure of the Olympic Games' exclusive includes: minutes from the 1894 IOC meeting agreeing to re-establish the Olympic Games. It offers an original poster showing the events of Paris 1900 Games. It is an invitation to the Royal Box at the London 1908 Games. It is a model Olympic Village from the Los Angeles 1932 Games. It provides correspondence expressing concerns about the organization of the Berlin 1936 Olympic Games; a fold-out venue map to 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games. It features Tokyo 1964 Opening ceremony tickets and media passes. It provides a police report into the Munich 1972 hostage taking. It offers a recreation of a US 'Boycott the Games' car bumper sticker form the Moscow 1980 Games. It includes a Olympic Truce document from the Barcelona 1992 Games. It provides a London 2012 poster featuring the vibrant official emblem.