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Books > Sport & Leisure > Sports & outdoor recreation > Sporting events, tours & organisations > Olympic games
This title is suitable for children of ages 6 to 9 years. Celebrate
the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games with fun and thought provoking
activities. Students learn about Vancouver, as well as Olympic
history, traditions, and the sports that will be played.
Opening with Vince Lombardi's last win as coach of the Packers in
Super Bowl II and closing with Joe Namath's Super Bowl III
guarantee, James Nicholson delivers an original portrait of a
sensational closing decade in American culture. Controversies on
the field and in the ring reflected broader political and social
turmoil in the late-sixties United States. With one of the most
contentious presidential elections in US history, the ongoing civil
rights movement, and the Vietnam War all storming in the
background, Nicholson charts a course through the oddly unsettled
waters of American sports in 1968: the Masters golf tournament
decided by the strict enforcement of an arcane rule to the
detriment of a foreign player; the winner of the Kentucky Derby
disqualified for a drug violation; Muhammad Ali waiting in sports
exile while he appealed a criminal conviction for draft evasion; an
unorthodox rendition of the national anthem at the World Series
nearly overshadowing the game it preceded; and the silent gesture
at the Mexico City Olympics made by Tommie Smith and John Carlos
that shocked the nation
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.
The extraordinary story of the small Vermont town that has likely
produced more Olympians per capita than any other place in the
country, Norwich gives "parents of young athletes a great gift--a
glimpse at another way to raise accomplished and joyous
competitors" (The Washington Post). In Norwich, Vermont--a charming
town of organic farms and clapboard colonial buildings--a culture
has taken root that's the opposite of the hypercompetitive
schoolyard of today's tiger moms and eagle dads. In Norwich, kids
aren't cut from teams. They don't specialize in a single sport, and
they even root for their rivals. What's more, their hands-off
parents encourage them to simply enjoy themselves. Yet this village
of roughly three thousand residents has won three Olympic medals
and sent an athlete to almost every Winter Olympics for the past
thirty years. Now, New York Times reporter and "gifted storyteller"
(The Wall Street Journal) Karen Crouse spills Norwich's secret to
raising not just better athletes than the rest of America but
happier, healthier kids. And while these "counterintuitive" (Amy
Chua, bestselling author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother)
lessons were honed in the New England snow, parents across the
country will find that "Crouse's message applies beyond a
particular town or state" (The Wall Street Journal). If you're
looking for answers about how to raise joyful, resilient kids, let
Norwich take you to a place that has figured it out.
In 1968, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) implemented sex
testing for female athletes at that year's Games. When it became
clear that testing regimes failed to delineate a sex divide, the
IOC began to test for gender--a shift that allowed the organization
to control the very idea of womanhood. Ranging from Cold War
tensions to gender anxiety to controversies around doping, Lindsay
Parks Pieper explores sex testing in sport from the 1930s to the
early 2000s. Pieper examines how the IOC in particular insisted on
a misguided binary notion of gender that privileged Western norms.
Testing evolved into a tool to identify--and eliminate--athletes
the IOC deemed too strong, too fast, or too successful. Pieper
shows how this system punished gifted women while hindering the
development of women's athletics for decades. She also reveals how
the flawed notions behind testing--ideas often sexist, racist, or
ridiculous--degraded the very idea of female athleticism.
The 1972 Munich Olympics - remembered almost exclusively for the
devastating terrorist attack on the Israeli team - were intended to
showcase the New Germany and replace lingering memories of the
Third Reich. That hope was all but obliterated in the early hours
of September 5, when gun-wielding Palestinians murdered 11 members
of the Israeli team. In the first cultural and political history of
the Munich Olympics, Kay Schiller and Christopher Young set these
Games into both the context of 1972 and the history of the modern
Olympiad. Delving into newly available documents, Schiller and
Young chronicle the impact of the Munich Games on West German
society.
"A clear-eyed, critical examination of the social, political, and
economic costs of hosting the 2016 summer Olympics The selection of
Rio de Janeiro as the site of the summer 2016 Olympic Games set off
jubilant celebrations in Brazil-and created enormous expectations
for economic development and the advancement of Brazil as a major
player on the world stage. Although the games were held without
major incident, the economic, environmental, political, and social
outcomes for Brazil ranged from disappointing to devastating.
Corruption scandals trimmed the fat profits that many local real
estate developers had envisioned, and the local government was
driven into bankruptcy. At the other end of the economic spectrum,
some 77,000 residents of Rio's poorest neighborhoods-the
favelas-were evicted and forced to move, in many cases as far as 20
or 30 miles to the west. Hosting the games ultimately cost Brazil
$20 billion, with little positive to show for the investment. Rio
2016 assembles the views of leading experts on Brazil and the
Olympics into a clear-eyed assessment of the impact of the games on
Brazil in general and on the lives of Cariocas, as Rio's residents
are known. Edited by sports economist Andrew Zimbalist, the other
contributors include Juliana Barbassa, Jules Boykoff, Jamil Chade,
Stephen Essex, Renata Latuf, and Theresa Williamson. "
The word 'athletics' is derived from the Greek verb 'to struggle
for a prize'. After reading this book, no one will see the Olympics
as a graceful display of Greek beauty again, but as war by other
means. Nigel Spivey paints a portrait of the Greek Olympics as they
really were - fierce contests between bitter rivals, in which
victors won kudos and rewards, and losers faced scorn and even
assault. Victory was almost worth dying for, and a number of
athletes did just that. Many more resorted to cheating and bribery.
Contested always bitterly and often bloodily, the ancient Olympics
were not an idealistic celebration of unity, but a clash of
military powers in an arena not far removed from the battlefield.
This book deals with whether the 2008 Olympics brought any
benefits, or any lasting benefits, to the Chinese people by
enhancing human rights and accelerating rule of law development.
China views the 2008 Olympics as not merely just an athletic event,
but as recognition of its global, economic, diplomatic, and
military power. It is a way of extending themselves to the world.
It is, to them, a political event in many ways, and one of great
significance.
With his last-gasp victory as part of the Great British coxless
four team at the Athens Olympics, Matthew Pinsent clinched an
historic fourth Olympic Gold to add to the three already won with
his legendary rowing partner Steve Redgrave. In an uniquely
exciting and evocative autobiography, Pinsent interweaves the
build-up to Athens 2004 with the extraordinary story of his career
and unforgettable partnership with Redgrave. Plucked from obscurity
at the age of 20, told to partner his hero, and trained to within
an inch of his life, Pinsent's story is uniquely revealing about
what it takes to be a champion and the mixed blessings of success.
Culminating with a nail-biting final chapter detailing the team's
extraordinary victory in Athens in blow-by-blow detail, A Lifetime
in a Race is a sports book in a different mould.
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.
Warm, insightful and never preachy, "Champions Are Raised, Not
Born" is a thought-provoking, important book for any parent
interested in raising a happy, healthy, and successful child.
Olympic medalist Summer Sanders draws on her own experience and
that of other athletes to pinpoint what propels champions to the
top.
In the 1960s, Bruce Kidd was one of Canada's most celebrated
athletes. As a teenager, Kidd won races all over the globe,
participated in the Olympics, and started a revolution in distance
running and a revival in Canadian track and field. He quickly
became a symbol of Canadian youth and the subject of endless media
coverage. Although most athletes of his generation were cautioned
to keep their opinions to themselves, Kidd took it upon himself to
speak out on the problems and possibilities of Canadian sport.
Encouraged by his parents and teammates, Kidd criticized the racism
and sexism of amateur sport in Canada, the treatment of players in
the National Hockey League, American control of the Canadian
Football League, and the uneven coverage of sports by the media -
and he continues to fight for equity to this day. After retiring
from his career as an athlete, Kidd became a well-known advocate
for gender and racial justice and an academic leader at the
University of Toronto. Depicting a Canadian sport legend's journey
of joy, discovery, and activism, this memoir bears witness to the
remarkable changes Bruce Kidd has lived through in more than
seventy years of participation in Canadian and international
sports.
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