By David Goldblatt
The definitive activities and social background of the trendy Olympic Games―by the most celebrated sportswriters of our time.
Renowned sportswriter David Goldblatt has been hailed via the Wall highway Journal for writing “with the expansive eye of a social and cultural critic” In The video games Goldblatt gives you a magisterial heritage of the most important carrying occasion of all of them: the Olympics. He tells the epic tale of the video games from their reinvention in Athens in 1896 to the current day, chronicling vintage moments of carrying fulfillment from Jesse Owens to Nadia Comăneci, the Miracle on Ice to Usain Bolt. He is going past the medal counts to discover how foreign conflicts have performed out on the Olympics, together with the function of the video games in Fascist Germany and Italy, the chilly conflict, and the struggles of the postcolonial global for reputation. He additionally tells the extreme tale of ways girls fought to be integrated on equivalent phrases, how the Paralympics all started within the wake of worldwide struggle II, and the way the Olympics mirror altering attitudes to race and ethnicity. eight pages pf pictures
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Extra resources for The Games: A Global History of the Olympics
Example text
5 In fact, although there were no cash prizes at Olympia, the games were set within an often highly professionalized and commercialized sporting culture. Beyond Olympia, there was a widespread circuit of athletic and sporting competitions all over the eastern Mediterranean, with prizes in cash and other goods. Participation in those races didn’t debar athletes from Olympia. Ambitious politicians, like the sixth-century Athenian, Solon, were known to offer rewards to champions on their return home.
Two further Shropshire games were held in 1874 and 1875, but they could no longer be considered national in any sense. At the same time, the AAC consolidated its hold over national athletic events and turned itself into the Amateur Athletics Association (AAA), which came to run the sport nationally. The final NOA games, held in 1883 in the tiny village of Hadley, north of Much Wenlock, were microscopic. Dr Brookes and the Much Wenlock games themselves endured, and Brookes continued to campaign for the British government to support popular physical education, and to correspond with the Greek authorities and others about the possibility of staging a revived Olympic Games, but for a long time his reach and influence was nugatory.
The wider athletic culture aspired to the Hellenic virtues of a balance between mental and physical health. Above all, it reserved a place for glory and honour, bravery and valour. Coubertin’s distillation of the public-school games ethic, moulded by this generation of teachers and the muscular Christians of the second half of the nineteenth century, like Charles Kingsley, would in time form a core component of his syncretic notion of Olympism. In the late 1880s, he deployed it to argue for the profound reform of French education, and not just for the elites, but for the masses too.