"What was it like to attend the ancient Olympic Games?
With the summer Olympics' return to Athens, Tony Perrottet delves into the ancient world and lets the Greek Games begin again. The acclaimed author of Pagan Holiday brings attitude, erudition, and humor to the fascinating story of the original Olympic festival, tracking the event day by day to re-create the experience in all its compelling spectacle.
Using firsthand reports and little-known sources--including an actual "Handbook for a Sports Coach used by the Greeks--The Naked Olympics creates a vivid picture of an extravaganza performed before as many as forty thousand people, featuring contests as timeless as the javelin throw and as exotic as the chariot race.
Peeling away the layers of myth," Perrottet lays bare the ancient sporting experience--including the round-the-clock bacchanal inside the tents of the Olympic Village, the all-male nude workouts under the statue of Eros, and history's first corruption scandals involving athletes. Featuring sometimes scandalous cameos by sports enthusiasts Plato, Socrates, and Herodotus, The Naked Olympics offers essential insight into today's Games and an unforgettable guide to the world's first and most influential athletic festival.
"Just in time for the modern Olympic games to return to Greece this summer for the first time in more than a century, Tony Perrottet offers up a diverting primer on the Olympics of the ancient kind....Well researched; his sources are as solid as sources come. It's also well writen....Perhaps no book of the season will show us so briefly and entertainingly just how complete is our inheritance from the Greeks, vulgarity and all."
--TheWashington Post

Sixty years ago the Olympic flame was ignited for the first time in the sacred grove of Olympia and carried to the opening of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. The significance of the Olympic flame has continued to grow ever since as it travels around the world, visiting different cultures and countries bringing with it the hope for peace and the aim for international understanding.

The Journey of the Olympic Flame celebrates the history and legacy of this time-honored Olympic tradition. This unique book honors the history of the Olympic flame's many journeys as well as the inspirational stories that carried it. It will connect the audience more closely to the Olympic Games, its athletic heroes, the spirit, and the Olympic ideals. This inspiring publication has wide appeal and will be the most complete history done on the Olympic Flame.

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.

Sam Quek is mainly known for her starring role in the 2016 Olympic gold medal winning hockey team. This was the first time a British ladies team had won gold, but what is much less known is that Sam's rise to the top of her spot was far from easy. Sam missed out on being part of Team GB at the London 2012 Olympics but competed for England at the 2013 EuroHockey tournament and 2014 Commonwealth Games, which she won silver medals. She won the gold at the 2016 Rio Olympics after the GB hockey team beat the Netherlands on penalties. How Sam overcame the bitter disappointment of being overlooked for the two previous Olympics and ensured that she wouldn't miss out again are revealed here for the first time. She also tells of her tough childhood and her battle to reach the heights that she has. She then went on to further fame by appearing in 'I'm a Celebrity' where she proved to be hugely popular with the viewing public, eventually finishing fourth. Sam now presents a variety of sports for TV, including men and women's football, NFL and hockey. She has been signed up to be the main presenter for the women's World Hockey Championships in 2018, held in August. She is hugely popular on social media with thousands of followers on twitter and instagram. Sam also has some very strong views on how women are portrayed in sport and their treatment by both coaches and the media. This is a hugely topical subject at the moment and promises to remain so for some time.

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.

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.

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.

During the Cold War, political tensions associated with the division of Germany came to influence the world of competitive sport. In the 1950s, West Germany and its NATO allies refused to recognize the communist East German state and barred its national teams from sporting competitions. The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 further exacerbated these pressures, with East German teams denied travel to several world championships. These tensions would only intensify in the run-up to the 1968 Olympics. In Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games, Heather L. Dichter considers how NATO and its member states used sport as a diplomatic arena during the height of the Cold War, and how international sport responded to political interference. Drawing on archival materials from NATO, foreign ministries, domestic and international sport functionaries, and newspapers, Dichter examines controversies surrounding the 1968 Summer and Winter Olympic Games, particularly the bidding process between countries to host the events. As she demonstrates, during the Cold War sport and politics became so intertwined that they had the power to fundamentally transform each other.