The Games
A Global History of the Olympics
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award.
From the ancient Greeks to today’s festival of sponsors – this is the definitive sporting, social and political history of the Olympic Games.
'An excellent, pacy, anecdote-studded history of the modern Games' – The Times
The Olympic Games have become the greatest show on earth. But how was such a ritual invented? Why did it prosper and how has it been so utterly transformed?
In The Games, sports historian David Goldblatt takes on a breathtakingly ambitious search for the answers and brilliantly unravels the complex strands of this history.
Beginning with the Olympics as a sporting side show at the great Worlds Fairs of the Belle Epoque and its transformation into a global media spectacular, care of Hollywood and the Nazi party. The Games shows how sport and the Olympics had been a battlefield during the Cold War, a defining moment for social and economic change in host cities and countries, and a theatre of resistance for women and athletes of colour once excluded from the show.
Filled with stories from over a century of Olympic competition – this amazingly researched history captures the excitement of sporting brilliance and the kaleidoscopic experience of the Games. It shows us how this sporting spectacle has come to reflect the world we hope to inhabit and the one we actually live in.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Starting with the vigorous reboot of the modern Olympics by French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin in the 19th century, Goldblatt (The Ball Is Round) chronicles the largest sporting event from the ancient games to the highly organized current spectacles of competition. Goldblatt, who uses peerless research to support his smoothly academic narrative, touches on the history of the first Greek games in 776 BC, the revival of the event in Athens in 1859, and its decline until Coubertin's effort to restart the games. The narrative includes the struggle of women and minorities in the games, and hits its stride when it details the grandeur of Hitler's 1936 games and the boldness of two black athletes, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Goldblatt casts a wide net, covering the rise of TV as a global booster, the Cold War conflicts, the 1972 Munich massacre, the dominance of American swimmer Michael Phelps and Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, and the Russian doping scandal. Goldblatt takes a comprehensive, balanced look at the games that rates above its peers..
