The Games
11 January 2018Synopsis
Winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award.
From the ancient Greeks to today’s festival of sponsors – this is the definitive sporting, social and political history of the Olympic Games.
'An excellent, pacy, anecdote-studded history of the modern Games' – The Times
The Olympic Games have become the greatest show on earth. But how was such a ritual invented? Why did it prosper and how has it been so utterly transformed?
In The Games, sports historian David Goldblatt takes on a breathtakingly ambitious search for the answers and brilliantly unravels the complex strands of this history.
Beginning with the Olympics as a sporting side show at the great Worlds Fairs of the Belle Epoque and its transformation into a global media spectacular, care of Hollywood and the Nazi party. The Games shows how sport and the Olympics had been a battlefield during the Cold War, a defining moment for social and economic change in host cities and countries, and a theatre of resistance for women and athletes of colour once excluded from the show.
Filled with stories from over a century of Olympic competition – this amazingly researched history captures the excitement of sporting brilliance and the kaleidoscopic experience of the Games. It shows us how this sporting spectacle has come to reflect the world we hope to inhabit and the one we actually live in.
Details
11 January 2018
9781447298878Reviews
Financial Times, Books of the Year 2016 'Goldblatt has become arguably the premier Anglophone sports historian. Unflinching before millennia worth of material, he tells the Olympic story from the ancient Greeks to today’s festival of sponsors. This book is illuminating, erudite, fair-minded, readable, told at a cracking pace, and put the Games in their social and political context.'Financial Times, Books of the Year 2016
'If reading Goldblatt often forces confrontation with the ugly reality behind sporting fantasies, his encyclopaedic approach… still retains space for the extraordinary and inspirational in the arena.'Spectator
'Goldblatt has curated a definitive, thoughtful history.'Sport Magazine
'The book is ambitious and might have been daunting but Goldblatt is a well-qualified guide, bring the kind of insight and scale he brought to his heroic history of football, The Ball Is Round.Observer
