The race to secure the bid for the Summer Games of 2012 is among the most intense in history. Five of the world's most prominent cities have tossed their hat into the ring for the right to host the most prestigious international event in sports. They have consciously chosen to saddle the immense responsibility that comes with a winning bid. It seems that, more than any impending Summer Games, the 2012 bid has garnered substantial media and public attention and scrutiny well before the host city was due to be decided. Never before has the competition been so close and packed with an almost tangible tension. The five cities to make it to the final round have gone to tremendous lengths to prove to the world that their bid is the most worthy. Madrid, Moscow, Paris, London, and New York are battling it out in this battle of metropolises to see who will be the last city standing in this global political, civic, athletic, and financial battle of pride to be known as the 2012 host city. This book aims to condense what is a mountain of numbers and documents diligently presented by each candidate city into information that is slightly simpler to understand for outsiders to give the reader a clearer view into the rather exclusive and often unforgiving world of planning to host the Summer Games. Also by Chetan Dave: Bronx Cheer For more information logon to: www. chetandave.com or www.ultimatewriter.com

"In this book on the spectacular races at the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, Bill Stowe writes with the same deadly accuracy and drive that he showed as the stroke of that crew. He writes not as his own remembrances would be so long after the fact, but rather in the tightly woven factual web of interviews of rowers from around the world. This is a compelling book because it develops the diverse backgrounds and experiences that a small group of men brought for the sole purpose of winning a gold medal in the Olympics. It was so momentous that this feat has not been repeated for the United States for 40 years, and then only with the force of a truly national effort and all of the weight and backing that that brings. Vesper is a storied club and it is in this romantic context that this group of lightly regarded mature men won for their club, their city and their country. Each man brings a special facet of himself to build the mosaic that created the perfect mix. This is a compelling story, intricately researched and crisply written that makes it a must for people who dream and who want to succeed." Allen P. Rosenberg
Coach of the 1964 Olympic Crew ""ALL TOGETHER" is an inspirational story about one of the biggest upsets in Olympic history. A must read for any American who has ever picked up an oar" Mike Teti
Coach of the 2004 Olympic Crew

According to most accounts, the man solely responsible for reviving the modern Olympic Games was Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Now, in "The Modern Olympics," David C. Young challenges this view, revealing that Coubertin was only the last and most successful of many contributors to the dream of the modern Olympics.

Based on thirteen years of research in previously neglected documents, Young reconstructs the fascinating and almost unknown history of the Olympic revival movement in the nineteenth century, including two long-forgotten Olympiads--one in London in 1866 and another in Athens in 1870. He traces the idea for the modern Olympics back to an obscure Greek poet in 1833 and follows the sinuous tale to a small village in England, where W. P. Brookes held local Olympiads, founded the British Olympic Committee, and told Coubertin about his vision of an international Olympics.

Coubertin's main contribution to the founding of the modern Olympics was the zeal he brought to transforming an idea that had evolved over decades into the reality of Olympiad I and all the Olympic Games held thereafter.

Get in the game with Crabtree's exciting series on some of children's favorite sports.

Features:
-- the history of the sport
-- basic rules of play
-- equipment and safety precautions
-- techniques and quick tips for kids on how to improve their skills
-- action-packed photos showing boys and girls demonstrating moves
-- emphasis on the value of fair play and teamwork
-- how the professional leagues work

Figure skating has fast become one of the world's most-watched sports. Color photos of budding amateur skaters and international competitors show everything from the basics to combination jumps and pair-skating lifts.

Also included is information on:
-- forward and backward skating
-- turning and stopping
-- ice-dancing and synchronized skating

Longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award

Simon Timson and Chelsea Warr were the Performance Directors of UK Sport, tasked with the outrageous objective of delivering even greater success to Team GB and ParalympicsGB at Rio than in 2012. Something no other host nation had ever achieved in the next Games.

In The Talent Lab, Owen Slot brings unique access to Team GB’s intelligence, sharing for the first time the incredible breakthroughs and insights they discovered that often extend way beyond sport. Using lessons from organisations as far afield as the Yehudi Menuhin School of Music, the NFL Draft, the Royal College of Surgeons and the SAS, it shows how talent can be discovered, created, shaped and sustained.

Charting the success of the likes of Chris Hoy, Max Whitlock, Adam Peaty, Ed Clancy, Lizzy Yarnold, Dave Henson, Tom Daley, Jessica Ennis-Hill, Katherine Grainger, the Brownlee Brothers, Helen Glover, Anthony Joshua and the women’s hockey team, The Talent Lab tells just how it was done and how any team, business or individual might learn from it.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.