A raw, uplifting story from one of the most important hidden figures in track and field history. When Pauline Davis first began to run, it wasn't with any thought of future Olympic glory. A product of the poor neighborhood of Bain Town in The Bahamas, she carried the family's buckets every day to fetch fresh water-and ran sideways, sprinting barefoot from bullies, to get the buckets of water home without spilling. But when a seasoned track coach saw Pauline sprinting, he saw the heart of a champion. In Running Sideways, Pauline Davis shares her inspiring story. Born and raised in the ghetto, Pauline fought through poverty, inequality, racism, and political machinations from her own country to beat the odds and become a two-time Olympic gold medalist, the first individual gold medalist in sprinting from the Caribbean, the first woman of color on the World Athletics council, and a central figure in the Russian anti-doping campaign. A casualty herself of the doping plague that hit track and field-she wouldn't be awarded her individual gold medal until after Marion Jones was infamously stripped of her medals for doping-Pauline dedicated her years on the World Athletics council to clean sport and fair play. Running Sideways is a book about determination, faith, focus, and an incredible will to succeed. It's about a trailblazer in women's sports, not just in The Bahamas, not just in track and field, but on the global stage.

This book explores the relationship between diplomatic discourse and the Olympic Movement, charting its continuity and change from an historical perspective. Using the recent body of literature on diplomacy it explores the evolution of diplomatic discourse around a number of themes, in particular the increasing range of stakeholders engaged in the Olympic bid, disability advocacy and the mainstreaming of the Paralympic Games and the evolution of the Olympic boycott. The work addresses the increasing engagement of a number of non-state actors, in particular the IOC and the IPC, as indicative of the diffusion of contemporary diplomacy. At the same time it identifies the state as continuing in the role of primary actor, setting the terms of reference for diplomatic activity beyond the pursuit of its own policy interests. Its historical investigation, based around a UK case study, provides insights into the characteristics of diplomatic discourse relating to the Games, and creates the basis for mapping the future trajectory of diplomacy as it relates to the Olympic Movement.

2012 NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literary Work Biography/Autobiography "A powerful and poignant memoir." Cornel West, from the foreword "John Carlos is an American hero. And finally he has written a memoir to tell us his story and a powerful story it is. I couldn't put this book down." Michael Moore Seen around the world, John Carlos and Tommie Smith's Black Power salute on the 1968 Olympic podium sparked controversy and career fallout. Yet their show of defiance remains one of the most iconic images of Olympic history and the Black Power movement. Here is the remarkable story of one of the men behind the salute, lifelong activist John Carlos. John Carlos is a former track and field athlete and professional football player, and a founding member of the Olympic Project for Human Rights. He won the bronze medal in the 200-meter race at the 1968 Olympics, where his Black Power salute on the podium with Tommie Smith caused much political controversy. Dave Zirin is the author of four books, including Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love, A Peoples' History of Sports in the United States, and What's My Name, Fool?

An exploration of how the Olympics are organized in response to risk. This book looks at the tension between the riskiness of mega-events, attributable to their scale and complexities, and the societal, political and organizational pressures that exist for safety, security and management of risk - leading to changes in how the Games are governed.

This innovative study examines the Olympic programme from a critical feminist perspective, to shed new light on the issues of gender and inclusion at the Olympic Games and in the Olympic Movement. Incorporating both quantitative and qualitative data, the book identifies and analyzes the changes - and remaining gender differences - made on the Olympic Programmes for London 2012, and each of the subsequent Summer and Winter Olympic Games (Sochi 2014, Rio 2016, and Pyeongchang 2018), as well as the Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022 Games. The book draws on the IOC's own publications, information from International and National Sport Federations, and media sources to describe and explain the IOC's slow and uneven progress toward gender equality at the Olympic Games. This is important reading for any student, researcher, practitioner or policy maker with an interest in the Olympic Games, sport studies, gender studies, women's sport or major events.

The extraordinary true story of the U.S. sled hockey team that overcame physical adversity and internal strife to win Paralympic gold. When former NHL star Rick Middleton accepted the position of head coach for the United States sled hockey team, he wasn't sure what to expect. The program had never medaled-had never even come close, in fact. But where Middleton might have found despair, he instead found an incredible group of men who had battled their way back from hell to play the sport they love. In Hockey's Hidden Gods: The Untold Story of a Paralympic Miracle on Ice, S.C. Megale uncovers the remarkable tale of a team that shocked the world by taking U.S. sled hockey from worst to first in the 2002 Paralympics. Odds of winning were dismal. The road to victory seemed unfathomable. But this cast of fifteen athletes with disabilities, athletes who had helped build a groundbreaking U.S. sled hockey program with almost no outside support, ultimately persevered on the global stage. Featuring a fascinating history of sled hockey, exclusive interviews with players and coaches, action-packed game coverage, and intimate profiles sharing the players' personal journeys, Hockey's Hidden Gods is the uplifting story of how once-shattered dreams can be reborn and rebuilt through tenacity, grit, and an indomitable spirit.

On an April morning in 1896, unemployed single mother Stamata Revithi ran the 40 kilometers from Marathon to Athens, finishing in 5 hours 30 minutes. Barred from the first Olympic marathon, she was determined to prove herself. Through more than a century of Olympic Games history, women athletes who were held back from swimming because long skirts were required, limited to running single-lap races because of fallacies about fragility or forced to endure invasive gender exams competed in spite of endless challenges and denials of their abilities. From Athens 1896 to Tokyo 2020, this history of women's participation in the Olympic Games centers on athletes who overcame entrenched inequity to gain inclusion.

The true story of how a group of talented volleyball players learned to put their egos aside, became a team, and changed the sport of volleyball forever. In the early 1980s, a golden generation of volleyball players joined the U.S. men's national team. With the Olympics coming to Los Angeles in 1984, the pressure was on to build a winning program around these exceptional athletes. But could a group of individuals put aside their egos and play as a true team to achieve Olympic gold in their home country? In If Gold Is Our Destiny: How a Team of Mavericks Came Together for Olympic Glory, Sean P. Murray shares the incredible story of how a group of free-spirited players and their demanding coach captured the heart of a nation and became one of the greatest indoor volleyball teams of all time. As the team struggled leading up to the Olympics, head coach Doug Beal mandated a highly controversial three-week Outward Bound hike across one hundred miles in the Canyonlands and Abajo Mountains in Utah. Murray details all the internal strife and heartwarming triumphs from this unprecedented trip, as players and coaches learned to cooperate and trust one another. He reveals how the team used this newfound trust to implement an innovative approach to volleyball that changed not only their success on the court but the sport itself on a global scale. Featuring original interviews with players, coaches, and staff, along with a foreword by three-time gold medal champion Karch Kiraly, If Gold Is Our Destiny delivers an inside look at what it takes for a group of talented individuals to overcome their differences, build a culture of excellence, and become the best in the world.

The torch relay that staple of Olympic pageantry first opened the summer games in 1936 in Berlin. Proposed by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, the relay was to carry the symbolism of a new Germany across its route through southeastern and central Europe. Soon after the Wehrmacht would march in jackboots over the same terrain. The Olympic festival was a crucial part of the Nazi regime's mobilization of power. Nazi Games offers a superb blend of history and sport. The narrative includes a stirring account of the international effort to boycott the games, derailed finally by the American Olympic Committee and the determination of its head, Avery Brundage, to participate. Nazi Games also recounts the dazzling athletic feats of these Olympics, including Jesse Owens's four gold-medal performances and the marathon victory of Korean runner Kitei Son, the Rising Sun of imperial Japan on his bib."

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.

This handbook provides a critical assessment of contemporary issues that define the contours of the Paralympic Movement generally and the Paralympic Games more specifically. It addresses conceptualisations of disability sport, explores the structure of the Paralympic Movement and considers key political strategic and governance issues which have shaped its development. The Palgrave Handbook of Paralympic Studies is written by a range of international authors, a number of whom are senior strategists as well as academics, and explores legacy themes through case studies of recent Paralympic games. Written in the wake of the 2016 Rio Paralympic Games, it provides an assessment of contemporary challenges faced by the International Paralympic Committee and other key stakeholders in the Paralympic Movement. Its critical assessment of approaches to branding, classification, social inclusion and technological advances makes this handbook a valuable resource for undergraduate study across a range of sport and disability related programmes, as well as a point of reference for researchers and policy makers.

The political tension of the Cold War bled into the Olympic Games when each side engaged in psychological warfare, exploiting sport for political ends. In Helsinki, the Soviet Union nearly overtook the United States in the medal count. Caught off guard, the U.S. hastened to respond, certain that the Soviets would use a victory at the next Olympics to broadcast their superiority over the Western world. Following the 1956 suppression of the Hungarian uprising, a Soviet athlete struck a Hungarian opponent in the Melbourne water polo semifinals, turning the pool red. The United States covertly encouraged Eastern Bloc athletes to defect, communist Chinese agents nearly succeeded in goading the Taiwanese government into withdrawing from the games, and a forbidden romance between an American and Czech athlete resulted in a politically complex marriage. This history describes those stories and more that resulted from the complicated relationship between Cold War politics and the Olympics.

In recent decades, five to ten times as many persons have turned out for the Olympic flame relay as have watched Olympic sports contests live. Flame Relays and the Struggle for the Olympic Movement: Bearing Light, the first anthropological analysis of the contemporary torch relay, exposes and interprets the transformation of the ritual across a 25-year period, from Los Angeles 1984 through the IOC's 2009 announcement that, in the aftermath of the politically contentious Beijing performance, there will be no more global relays. This volume offers a rare case study of continuity and change in a leading transnational and trans-cultural ritual form. Through data publicly revealed for the first time, the reader is carried fully backstage and into the conflicts and negotiations among Olympic organizing committees, the Greek Olympic movement, national governments, and transnational actors like the IOC, commercial sponsors, and operations management firms. Readers will come to know the leading flame relay authorities and practitioners, gaining a deeper understanding of the Olympic managerial revolution with its characteristic 'world's best practice' language. Analysis of the transnational flow of Olympic operations management offers important corrections to much existing globalization theory by demonstrating both how powerful and how culturally and politically parochial world's best practices can turn out to be. The dialectic between the cultural performance genres of ritual and spectacle provides a further intellectual architecture for these studies posing the question of whether the Olympic Movement will be able to survive the successes of the Olympic Sports Industry. This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

In 2017 the Olympic Studies Centre of the German Sport University organized a workshop on Sport Development and Olympic Studies. This book resulted from the presentations and discussions they engendered around identifying new international collaborative research fields and deepening research on the Olympics, the Olympic Movement and sport development. The effective application of the hermeneutical method unifies the chapters. The interpretive strengths of this method sharpen the analytical perspective of the chapters, with the strict requirements for the use of primary sources meaning that the contributors have conducted extensive archival research. Assuring thematic coherence, the studies assembled for this book focus on the analysis of processes of continuity, transformation, and development across four areas: sport institutions and their policies; commissions within and policies of governing bodies of sports; legacy discussions; and sport events within the summer and winter Olympic Games transformed into political and cultural spectacles. Bringing together experts in the field, Sport Development and Olympic Studies will be of great use to scholars of Sport Development, Sport History, The Olympics and Sport Sociology. This book was originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.

This open access book is unique in presenting the first oral history of individuals with an intellectual disability and their families in China. In this summary volume and the two accompanying volumes that follow, individuals with an intellectual disability tell their life stories, while their family members, teachers, classmates, and co-workers describe their professional, academic, and family relationships. Besides interview transcripts, each volume provides observations and records in real time the daily experiences of people with an intellectual disability. Drawing on the methodologies of sociology and oral history, the summary volume provides an unprecedented account of how people with intellectual disabilities in China understand themselves while also examining pertinent issues of public policy and civil society that have ramifications beyond the field of disability itself.

5 September, 1972. 4.30 a.m. The Munich Olympic Village. Black September, a group of Palestinian terrorists, break into the Israeli team's apartments. It is the beginning of the most tragic event in Olympic history and, after twenty hours, the day will end in a massacre, with the deaths of eleven Israelis, five Palestinians and a German policeman. This is the story of the race-walker Shaul Ladany: a survivor. But more than just a member of the Israeli team from those terrible events in Munich, Ladany was a survivor of the darkest period in twentieth century history, having been interred as a child at the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, the camp where Anne Frank died. For the second time in his life, Ladany has survived history. Ladany, the world record holder in the fifty-mile walk and a professor of industrial engineering, is one of Israel's most successful athletes, having won dozens of national championships and competed at both the 1968 and 1972 Olympics; he was a student at Columbia University in New York, a soldier in the Six Days War and the Yom Kippur War. From Eichmann to Sharon, from Bikila to All Blacks, from Nixon to Thatcher: they are all a part of Ladany's walk through the twentieth century. Award-winning author and journalist Andrea Schiavon tells Ladany's extraordinary life and, walking with him, chronicles a whole century of events in this astonishing, touching and epic biography.

Hosting the Olympic Games reveals the true costs involved for the cities that hold these large-scale sporting events. It uncovers the financing of the Games, reviewing existing studies to evaluate the costs and benefits, and draws on case study experiences of the Summer and Winter Games from the past forty years to assess the short- and long-term urban legacies for host cities. Written in an easily accessible style and format, it provides an in-depth critical analysis into the franchise model of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and offers an alternative vision for future Games. This book is an important contribution to understanding the consequences for the host cities of Olympic Games.

This open access book contains the oral histories that were inspired by the work of the Special Olympics in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of its founding. The foreword and prefatory materials provide an overview of the Special Olympics and its growth in the People's Republic of China. The sections that follow record interview transcripts of individuals with intellectual disabilities living in Shanghai. In addition to chronicling the involvement of these individuals and their families in the Special Olympics movement, the interview transcripts also capture their daily lives and how they have navigated school and work.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the Olympics played an important role in the politics of the Cold War and was part of the conflicts between the Capitalist Block, the Socialist Block and Third World countries. The Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO) is one of the best examples of the politicization of sport and the Olympics in the Cold War era. From the 1980s onward, the Olympics has facilitated communication and cooperation between nations in the post-Cold War era and contributed to the formation of a new world order. In August 2016, the Games of the XXXI Olympiad were held in Rio de Janeiro, making Brazil the first South American country to host the Summer Olympics. This was widely regarded as a new landmark event in the history of the modern Olympic movement. From the GANEFO to Rio, the Olympic Games have witnessed the shifting balance in international politics and world economy. This book aims at understanding the transformation of the Olympics over the past decades and tries to explain how the Olympic movement played its part in world politics, the world economy and international relations against the background of the rise of developing countries. The chapters in this book were published as a special issue in The International Journal of the History of Sport.

The first book of its kind to name and compile a collective biography of Britain's women Olympians during the amateur phase of the Olympic Games before professionalization changed the face of Olympism in 1988. This is the first extensive and detailed study on Britain's women Olympians combining archival research with oral histories. Features key case studies of individuals highlighted from each Olympic Games, showcasing the variety of female athletes that have represented Britain. It also highlights the increase in British female Paralympic representation.

This book evaluates the local impacts and legacies of the Olympics in Rio by comparing Rio2016 with other Olympic experiences and evaluating the ways in which the Games served the city. The 2016 Rio Olympic Games took place in a scenario of enormous economic challenges and persistent inequalities. In contrast to all previous Olympic experiences, Brazil faced its worst economic recession ever recorded during the preparation phase for the Games. In addition to the national crisis, falling oil prices and corruption scandals fuelled the State of Rio's economic downfall. This book specifically assesses the relative social performance of Rio's city population with respect to control groups; covers traditional aspects of the Games' legacy such as tourism, infrastructure and sports practice; includes ordinary day-by-day aspects of the city's life, such as education, employment and housing; and scrutinizes critical areas such as urban mobility, gentrification and Guanabara Bay's pollution. This thorough analysis offers readers further understanding on assessing the impacts and legacies of the Olympic experience. It will be of great interest to upper-level students and academics of tourism, hospitality and events management.

Beyond the headlines of the world's most beloved sporting events Brazil hosted the 2016 men's World Cup at a cost of $15 billion to $20 billion, building large, new stadiums in cities that have little use for them anymore. The projected cost of Tokyo's 2020 Summer Olympic Games is estimated to be as high as $30 billion, much of it coming from the public trough. In the updated and expanded edition of his bestselling book, Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup, Andrew Zimbalist tackles the claim that cities chosen to host these high-profile sporting events experience an economic windfall. In this new edition he looks at upcoming summer and winter Olympic games, discusses the recent Women's World Cup, and the upcoming men's tournament in Qatar. Circus Maximus focuses on major cities, like London, Rio, and Barcelona, that have previously hosted these sporting events, to provide context for future host cities that will bear the weight of exploding expenses, corruption, and protests. Zimbalist offers a sobering and candid look at the Olympics and the World Cup from outside the echo chamber.