The Story of the Olympic Torch

The Story of the Olympic Torch PDF Author: Philip Barker
Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited
ISBN: 1445610280
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Traces the development of the run, the lighting of the cauldron and other symbolic elements of the Olympic Games

The Story of the Olympic Torch

The Story of the Olympic Torch PDF Author: Philip Barker
Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited
ISBN: 1445610280
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Traces the development of the run, the lighting of the cauldron and other symbolic elements of the Olympic Games

The Naked Olympics

The Naked Olympics PDF Author: Tony Perrottet
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 081296991X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
What was it like to attend the ancient Olympic Games? With the summer Olympics’ return to Athens, Tony Perrottet delves into the ancient world and lets the Greek Games begin again. The acclaimed author of Pagan Holiday brings attitude, erudition, and humor to the fascinating story of the original Olympic festival, tracking the event day by day to re-create the experience in all its compelling spectacle. Using firsthand reports and little-known sources—including an actual Handbook for a Sports Coach used by the Greeks—The Naked Olympics creates a vivid picture of an extravaganza performed before as many as forty thousand people, featuring contests as timeless as the javelin throw and as exotic as the chariot race. Peeling away the layers of myth, Perrottet lays bare the ancient sporting experience—including the round-the-clock bacchanal inside the tents of the Olympic Village, the all-male nude workouts under the statue of Eros, and history’s first corruption scandals involving athletes. Featuring sometimes scandalous cameos by sports enthusiasts Plato, Socrates, and Herodotus, The Naked Olympics offers essential insight into today’s Games and an unforgettable guide to the world’s first and most influential athletic festival. "Just in time for the modern Olympic games to return to Greece this summer for the first time in more than a century, Tony Perrottet offers up a diverting primer on the Olympics of the ancient kind….Well researched; his sources are as solid as sources come. It's also well writen….Perhaps no book of the season will show us so briefly and entertainingly just how complete is our inheritance from the Greeks, vulgarity and all." --The Washington Post

Bearing Light: Flame Relays and the Struggle for the Olympic Movement

Bearing Light: Flame Relays and the Struggle for the Olympic Movement PDF Author: John J. Macaloon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317968905
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
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.

A Visitor's Guide to the Ancient Olympics

A Visitor's Guide to the Ancient Olympics PDF Author: Neil Faulkner
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300159072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
A guide to the ancient Olympics features a program of events, transportation options as provided by passenger ferry and ox cart, accommodations, and dining options, all as they would have appeared in 338 BC in the spectacle's early days.

Power Games

Power Games PDF Author: Jules Boykoff
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784780731
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
A timely, no-holds barred, critical political history of the modern Olympic Games The Olympics have a checkered, sometimes scandalous, political history. Jules Boykoff, a former US Olympic team member, takes readers from the event’s nineteenth-century origins, through the Games’ flirtation with Fascism, and into the contemporary era of corporate control. Along the way he recounts vibrant alt-Olympic movements, such as the Workers’ Games and Women’s Games of the 1920s and 1930s as well as athlete-activists and political movements that stood up to challenge the Olympic machine.

The Games: A Global History of the Olympics

The Games: A Global History of the Olympics PDF Author: David Goldblatt
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393254119
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 755

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Book Description
“A people’s history of the Olympics.”—New York Times Book Review A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year The Games is best-selling sportswriter David Goldblatt’s sweeping, definitive history of the modern Olympics. Goldblatt brilliantly traces their history from the reinvention of the Games in Athens in 1896 to Rio in 2016, revealing how the Olympics developed into a global colossus and highlighting how they have been buffeted by (and affected by) domestic and international conflicts. Along the way, Goldblatt reveals the origins of beloved Olympic traditions (winners’ medals, the torch relay, the eternal flame) and popular events (gymnastics, alpine skiing, the marathon). And he delivers memorable portraits of Olympic icons from Jesse Owens to Nadia Comaneci, the Dream Team to Usain Bolt.

Nazi Games

Nazi Games PDF Author: David Clay Large
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393058840
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
"Nazi Games" recounts how the Olympic festival was a crucial part of the Nazi regime's mobilization of power. The narrative also includes a stirring account of the international effort to boycott the games, which was ultimately derailed by the American Olympic Committee.

Onward to the Olympics

Onward to the Olympics PDF Author: Gerald P. Schaus
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 1554587794
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
The Olympic Games have had two lives—the first lasted for a millennium with celebrations every four years at Olympia to honour the god Zeus. The second has blossomed over the past century, from a simple start in Athens in 1896 to a dazzling return to Greece in 2004. Onward to the Olympics provides both an overview and an array of insights into aspects of the Games’ history. Leading North American archaeologists and historians of sport explore the origins of the Games, compare the ancient and the modern, discuss the organization and financing of such massive athletic festivals, and examine the participation ,or the troubling lack of it, by women. Onward to the Olympics bridges the historical divide between the ancient and the modern and concludes with a thought-provoking final essay that attempts to predict the future of the Olympics over the twenty-first century.

Greeks, Romans, Germans

Greeks, Romans, Germans PDF Author: Johann Chapoutot
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520292979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
Much has been written about the conditions that made possible Hitler's rise and the Nazi takeover of Germany, but when we tell the story of the National Socialist Party, should we not also speak of Julius Caesar and Pericles? Greeks, Romans, Germans argues that to fully understand the racist, violent end of the Nazi regime, we must examine its appropriation of the heroes and lessons of the ancient world. When Hitler told the assembled masses that they were a people with no past, he meant that they had no past following their humiliation in World War I of which to be proud. The Nazis' constant use of classical antiquity—in official speeches, film, state architecture, the press, and state-sponsored festivities—conferred on them the prestige and heritage of Greece and Rome that the modern German people so desperately needed. At the same time, the lessons of antiquity served as a warning: Greece and Rome fell because they were incapable of protecting the purity of their blood against mixing and infiltration. To regain their rightful place in the world, the Nazis had to make all-out war on Germany's enemies, within and without.

Olympic Games as Performance and Public Event

Olympic Games as Performance and Public Event PDF Author: Arne Martin Klausen
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571812032
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Discusses how the winter games related to Norwegian culture and ethos.