CO356 - Sport Media - Meister: Olympics

Author Maraniss weaves sports, politics, and history into a tour de force about the 1960 Olympics. Along with the unforgettable characters and dramatic contests, there was a deeper meaning to those days at the dawn of the sixties. Change was everywhere. Old-boy notions of Olympic amateurism were crumbling. Rome saw the first doping scandal, the first commercially televised Summer Games, the first athlete paid for wearing a certain brand. In the heat of the Cold War, the city teemed with spies and rumors of defections, and every move was judged for propaganda value. While East and West Germans competed as a unified team, less than a year before the Berlin Wall, there was a dispute over the two Chinas. Fourteen nations were being born in sub-Saharan Africa. There was increasing pressure to provide equal rights for blacks and women. The world as we know it was coming into view.--From publisher description.

From ancient Egyptian archery and medieval Japanese football to contemporary American baseball, every sport has been shaped by--and in turn has helped shape--the culture of which it is a part. Yet as Allen Guttmann shows in this far-ranging study, for all their differences sports throughout the ages have exhibited many common characteristics. They have always been a domain for the cultivation of gender roles, for example, as well as for the enactment of class and ethnic identities. They have also followed a similar historical trajectory from traditional to modern forms. Written in entertaining, accessible prose and illustrated with dozens of images, Sports: The First Five Millennia traces this evolution across continents, cultures, and historical epochs to present a single comprehensive narrative of the world's sports. Beginning with a discussion of what constitutes a sport--and what does not--Guttmann explores the vast variety of sports played by the preliterate peoples of the Americas and Africa, by the Greeks and Romans of antiquity, and in premodern China and Japan as well as in Islamic Asia and medieval Europe. These traditional sports include everything from Cherokee stickball and Chinese kit-flying to Persian wrestling and English bearbaiting. Guttmann then turns his attention to modern sports, an invention of eighteenth-century England that spread throughout the world during the nineteenth century and became institutionalized during the twentieth. Marked by an adherence to codified rules and increasingly governed by international organizations such as the Federation Internationale de Football Association and the International Olympic Committee, modern sports have all butdisplaced their traditional antecedents throughout the world.

The 1936 Olympic Games played a key role in the development of both Hitler's Third Reich and international sporting competition. This volume gathers original essays by modern scholars from the Games' most prominent participating countries and lays out the issues -- sporting as well as political -- surrounding individual nations' involvement.The Nazi Olympics 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 -- three first-class Olympian nations with misgivings about participation -- as well as German ally Italy and future ally Japan. Other essays examine the issues at stake in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands, which opposed Hitler's politics, despite embodying his Aryan ideal.Challenging the view of sport as a trivial pursuit, this collection reveals exactly how high the political stakes were in 1936 and how the Nazi Olympics distilled many of the critical geopolitical issues of the time into a contest that was anything but trivial.

Athletics and politics collide in a critical event for Nazi Germany and the contemporary world. The Olympic festival was a crucial part of the Nazi regime's mobilization of power. The torch relay--that staple of Olympic pageantry--first opened the summer games in 1936 in Berlin. Proposed by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, the relay was to carry the symbolism of a new Germany across its route through southeastern and central Europe. Soon after, the Wehrmacht would march in jackboots over the same terrain. This book offers a blend of history and sport: it includes an account of the international effort to boycott the games, derailed by the American Olympic Committee. It also recounts the dazzling athletic feats of these Olympics, including Jesse Owens's four gold-medal performances, and the marathon victory of Korean runner Kitei Son, with the Rising Sun of imperial Japan on his bib.--From publisher description.

For two weeks in August 1936, Nazi Germany achieved an astonishing propaganda coup when it staged the Olympic Games in Berlin. Hiding their anti-semitism and plans for territorial expansion, the Nazis exploited the Olympic ideal, dazzling visiting spectators and journalists alike with an image of a peaceful, tolerant Germany. In Hitler's Olympics, Anton Rippon tells the story of those remarkable Games, the first to overtly use the Olympic festival for political purposes. His account, which is illustrated with almost 200 rare photographs of the event, looks at how the rise of the Nazis affected German sportsmen and women in the early 1930s. And it reveals how the rest of the world allowed the Berlin Olympics to go ahead despite the knowledge that Nazi Germany was a police state.

Daniel James Brown's robust book tells the story of the University of Washington's 1936 eight-oar crew and their epic quest for an Olympic gold medal, a team that transformed the sport and grabbed the attention of millions of Americans. The sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the boys defeated elite rivals first from eastern and British universities and finally the German crew rowing for Adolf Hitler in the Olympic games in Berlin, 1936.

Daniel James Brown's robust book tells the story of the University of Washington's 1936 eight-oar crew and their epic quest for an Olympic gold medal, a team that transformed the sport and grabbed the attention of millions of Americans. The sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the boys defeated elite rivals first from eastern and British universities and finally the German crew rowing for Adolf Hitler in the Olympic games in Berlin, 1936.

There was a time when running the mile in four minutes was believed to be beyond the limits of human foot speed, and in all of sport it was the elusive holy grail. In 1952, after suffering defeat at the Helsinki Olympics, three world-class runners each set out to break this barrier. Roger Bannister was a young English medical student who epitomized the ideal of the amateur — still driven not just by winning but by the nobility of the pursuit. John Landy was the privileged son of a genteel Australian family, who as a boy preferred butterfly collecting to running but who trained relentlessly in an almost spiritual attempt to shape his body to this singular task. Then there was Wes Santee, the swaggering American, a Kansas farm boy and natural athlete who believed he was just plain better than everybody else. Spanning three continents and defying the odds, their collective quest captivated the world and stole headlines from the Korean War, the atomic race, and such legendary figures as Edmund Hillary, Willie Mays, Native Dancer, and Ben Hogan. In the tradition of Seabiscuit and Chariots of Fire, Neal Bascomb delivers a breathtaking story of unlikely heroes and leaves us with a lasting portrait of the twilight years of the golden age of sport.

From Baron Pierre de Coubertin's original objectives in establishing the modern Olympic Games to the increasingly widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs during the Cold War to the 1998 drug scandal during the Tour de France and beyond, Steroids: A New Look at Performance-Enhancing Drugs puts the social construction of steroids as a banned substance under the microscope and interprets the implications of that particular conception of steroid use in sport.

This volume offers a distinctive and timely comparative analysis of the sociological, economic, and political significance of bids for, and the hosting of, sports mega-events throughout the world. The volume is a collection by leading international scholars examining sports mega-events, such as the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup.