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.

While attention is on Olympic triumphs and tribulations, there is much that goes on behind the scenes that is deeply troubling. Boykoff tells us that radical steps are required if the Games are to be fixed and only then will they be truly ‘athletes first’.

This book is an expose of one of the most bizarre festivals in sport history. It provides portraits of key figures including Adolf Hitler, Jesse Owens, Leni Riefenstahl, Helen Stephens, Kee Chung Sohn, and Avery Brundage. It also conveys the charade that reinforced and mobilized the hysterical patriotism of the German masses.

The 1936 Olympic Games played a key role in the development of both Hitler’s Third Reich and international sporting competition. The Nazi Olympics gathers essays by modern scholars from prominent participating countries and lays out the issues--sporting as well as political--surrounding the involvement of individual nations. The volume opens with an analysis of Germany’s preparations for the Games and the attempts by the Nazi regime to allay the international concerns about Hitler’s racist ideals and expansionist ambitions. Essays follow on the United States, Great Britain, and France--top-tier Olympian nations with misgivings about participation--as well as Germany's future Axis partners Italy and Japan. Other contributions examine the issues involved for Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Throughout, the authors reveal the high political stakes surrounding the Games and how the Nazi Olympics distilled critical geopolitical issues of the time into a spectacle of sport.

NOlympians: Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beyond investigates the intersection of the global rise of anti-Olympics activism and the declining popularity of hosting of the Games. The Olympics were once buoyed by myths of luminous prosperity and upticks in tourism and jobs, but in recent years these assurances have been debunked. Now more than ever, it’s clear that the Olympics have transmogrified into a political-economic juggernaut that arrives with displacement, expanded policing, and anti-democratic backroom deals. Jules Boykoff – a former professional soccer player who represented the US Olympic soccer team – zooms in on Los Angeles, where the Democratic Socialists of America have launched the NOlympics LA campaign ahead of the 2028 Summer Games. Boykoff shows how DSA-LA’s anti-Olympics activism fits with the resurgence of socialism in the US and beyond. Boykoff’s research, based on more than 100 interviews with anti-Olympics activists, personal experiences at protests in Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, London, and Tokyo, academic research, mass- and alternative-media coverage, and Olympic archives, is the backbone for this story of activists fighting against the odds and embracing the transformative politics of democratic socialism.

"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.

Recounts the story of the Olympics held in Berlin in 1936, and how the Nazis attempted to turn the games into a propaganda tool for their cause.