The Berlin Olympic Games, more than 70 years on, remain the most controversial ever held. This book creates a vivid account of the disputes, the personalities, and the events which made these Games so memorable. Ironically, the choice of Germany as the host nation for the 1936 Olympics was intended to signal its return to the world community after defeat in World War I. In actuality, Hitler intended the Berlin Games to be an advertisement for Germany as he was creating it, and they became one of the largest propaganda exercises in history. Two Germans Jews competed in the Games while the most memorable achievement was that of black American Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals. Ultimately, however, Germany was the overall biggest medal winner. The popular success of Owens allowed the Nazis to claim that their policies had no racial element and charges of antisemitism that did arise were leveled at the Americans.

This work is the result of a symposium which brought together a range of disciplines and perspectives, to celebrate the Centenary of Women in the Olympic Games. The various papers illustrate the diverse contributions made by women to the Olympic movement as well as the value to scientific research of the study of gender, power and culture in sport. The research papers in this volume include: "Gender, Science, Culture and Politics: 100 Years of Women in the Olympics"; "Science, Myths and Prejudice: Denial of Women as Athletes"; "Femocrats, Technocrats and Bureaucrats: Women's Contested Place in the Olympic Movement"; "Female Athletes with a Disability: Perspectives and Opportunities"; "The Movement for the Promotion of Women's Sport in Japan"; "Body and Power: From Cripples to Olympic Champions - Chinese Women's Long Struggle for Full Equality"; "Indigenous Women in the Olympics"; "Where Were They? Female Involvement in the Organization and Administration of the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games"; "Women Olympic Competitors 1900-1936: New Light on Old Controversies"; "The 1928 Olympic 800 Metres: Did Women Competitors Really Collapse?"

To most observers, the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, were an unmitigated success. That year, the unlikeliest of candidate cities in the unlikeliest of candidate countries did what many had thought impossible: it hosted an international sports competition at the highest level, housing and feeding hundreds of athletes and thousands of tourists while broadcasting a positive image of socialist Yugoslavia to the world. The first Winter Games held in a communist country, Sarajevo also marked the first Olympic confrontation of Soviet and American athletes since the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Games. And the competitions themselves were spectacular and memorable. This was the Olympics of British ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, American skiers "Wild Bill" Johnson and Debbie Armstrong, and East German skaters Katarina Witt and Karin Enke, not to mention a Soviet hockey team that rebounded from its stunning loss to the Americans at Lake Placid four years earlier to win all seven of its matches. Yet The Sarajevo Olympics is more than just a history of sport. Jason Vuic also retraces the history of the Olympic movement, analyzes the inner workings of the International Olympic Committee during the troubled 1970s and 1980s, and places the 1984 Winter Games in the context of Cold War geopolitics. The book begins and ends by reminding readers that less than a decade after it hosted the Olympics, the Bosnian city of Sarajevo found itself at the vortex of a bloody and brutal civil war that would end with the dissolution of the multiethnic Yugoslavian state.