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.

This volume focuses on the modernist and avant-garde engagement with workers’ sport events that were organised or were planned to be organised in the cities of Central Europe and the USSR in the period of 1920–1932: Frankfurt am Main – Vienna – Moscow – Prague – Budapest – Berlin. During the 1920s and 1930s, two organisations of workers’ sport operated: the Lucerne Sport International/Socialist Workers’ Sport International and the Red Sport International, which held the socialist Workers’ Olympics and the communist Spartakiads, respectively. These events were not aimed at cultivating national victories and individual athletic records, but at mobilising workers for the class struggle and at creating new culture for the working class. This book examines the visual propaganda of the Workers’ Olympics and the Spartakiads expressed through paintings, sculptures, prints, illustrations, posters, postcards, photomontages, photographs, films, theatre and architectural projects. It emphasises the significance of workers’ sport for the artistic and social changes within a utopian project of a new culture, as visualised by the modernist and avant-garde artists, including Varvara Stepanova, Gustav Klucis, and Otto Nagel. This volume is of great use to students and scholars of the history of sport, art history and cultural history in interwar Europe and the Soviet Union.

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 Olympics have developed into the world's premier sporting event. They are simultaneously a competitive exhibition and a grand display of cooperation that bring together global cultures on ski slopes, shooting ranges, swimming pools, and track ovals. Given their scale in the modern era, the Games are a useful window for better comprehending larger cultural, social, and historical processes, argues Jules Boykoff, an academic social scientist and a former Olympic athlete. In Activism and the Olympics, Boykoff provides a critical overview of the Olympic industry and its political opponents in the modern era. After presenting a brief history of Olympic activism, he turns his attention to on-the-ground activism through the lens of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics and the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Here we see how anti-Olympic activists deploy a range of approaches to challenge the Olympic machine, from direct action and the seizure of public space to humor-based and online tactics. Drawing on primary evidence from myriad personal interviews with activists, journalists, civil libertarians, and Olympics organizers, Boykoff angles in on the Games from numerous vantages and viewpoints. Although modern Olympic authorities have strived—even through the Cold War era—to appear apolitical, Boykoff notes, the Games have always been the site of hotly contested political actions and competing interests. During the last thirty years, as the Olympics became an economic juggernaut, they also generated numerous reactions from groups that have sought to challenge the event’s triumphalism and pageantry. The 21st century has seen an increased level of activism across the world, from the Occupy Movement in the United States to the Arab Spring in the Middle East. What does this spike in dissent mean for Olympic activists as they prepare for future Games?

Global sporting events involve the creation, management and mediation of cultural meanings for consumption by massive media audiences. The apotheosis of this cultural form is the Olympic Games. This challenging and provocative new book explores the Olympic spectacle, from the multi-media bidding process and the branding and imaging of the Games, to security, surveillance and control of the Olympic product across all of its levels. The book argues that the process of commercialization, directed by the IOC itself, has enabled audiences to interpret its traditional objects in non-reverential ways and to develop oppositional interpretations of Olympism. The Olympics have become multi-voiced and many themed, and the spectacle of the contemporary Games raises important questions about institutionalization, the doctrine of individualism, the advance of market capitalism, performance, consumption and the consolidation of global society. With particular focus on the London Games in 2012, the book casts a critical eye over the bidding process, Olympic finance, promises of legacy and development, and the consequences of hosting the Games for the civil rights and liberties of those living in their shadow. Few studies have offered such close scrutiny of the inner workings of Olympism’s political and economic network, and, therefore, this book is indispensible reading for any student or researcher with an interest in the Olympics, sport's multiple impacts, or sporting mega-events.

When Adolf Hitler hosted the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, he used the Games to rally political support in Germany and abroad for his white supremacist worldview. In doing so, Hitler not only ruptured the myth that politics and sports do not mix, but he also initiated the first major instance of sportswashing: hosting a sports mega-event to launder one’s stained reputation on the world stage. The 1936 Berlin Olympics: Race, Power, and Sportswashing situates these controversial Games in the longer political history of the Olympics and examines the behind-the-scenes machinations that led to the International Olympic Committee handing these Games to Germany in the first place. In the United States, the Berlin Olympics catalyzed a raucous, if ultimately unsuccessful, boycott campaign that raised serious concerns about racialized repression in the host country. The Berlin Games furnished a high-profile testing ground for racial theories rooted in white supremacy—the marrow in the Nazis’ ideological bones—where Black athletes like Jesse Owens thrived. The Games also brought innovations—like the Olympic Torch Relay—that were subsequently woven into Olympic tradition. Sportswashing is a significant concern in modern-day sports studies; this book demonstrates how the Olympic Games have long been both a potential pedestal for autocrats to boost their unsavory regimes and a flashpoint for human-rights criticism. Although history does not gift the present moment with crisp facsimiles from the past, thinking through history illuminates patterns and possibilities that can help make sense of the whirling swirl of today.

The book aims to outline the progress, problems and challenges of delivering a safe and secure Olympics in the context of the contemporary serious and enduring terrorist threat. The enormous media profile and symbolic significance of the Olympic Games, the history of terrorists aiming to use such high-profile events to advance their cause, and Al Qaeda's aim to cause mass casualties, all have major implications for the security of London 2012. Drawing on contributions from leading academics and practitioners in the field the book will assess the current terrorist threat, particularly focusing on terrorist targeting and how the Olympics might feature in this, before addressing particular response themes such as transport security, the role of surveillance, resilient designing of Olympic sites, the role of private security, and the challenge of inter-agency coordination. The book will conclude by providing an assessment of the legacy of Olympic security to date and will discuss the anticipated issues and dilemmas of the future. This book will be of interest to students of terrorism studies, security studies, counter-terrorism and sports studies.