Sports Management, Physical Education, and Athletic Studies

The Olympic Games have become a subject of major importance to students, academics, sports bodies, politicians, urban planners, and the public at large. The Olympic Rings are among the most recognised symbols in the world, and there are few other cultural phenomena that attract such a significant following in the popular media or such widespread support among the nations of the world. "Global Olympics: Historical and Sociological Studies of the Modern Games" draws together some of the world's leading scholars on critical issues emerging from ancient Olympic contests and over one hundred years.

"The Olympics have not always been the commercialized juggernaut we know today, but as Jules Boykoff makes clear in this story-filled and devastating history, the Games have since their inception had a thoroughly checkered political history. Pierre de Coubertin, the aristocrat who gave birth to the modern olympics, was against allowing women to participate, and allowed African countries to participate only to offset their "individual laziness." Boykoff, a former member of the US olympic soccer team, takes readers from the nineteenth-century origins of the modern Games, through its flirtations with Fascism, and into the contemporary era of corrupt, corporate control. Along the way he recounts vibrant alt-olympics movements, like the Workers' games and Women's Games of the 1920s and 1930s to the Gay Games of the 1980s through today"-- Provided by publisher.