The Olympic Winter Games at 100


Book Description

2024 marks the 100-year anniversary of the winter sports week festival celebrated in Chamonix in 1924, which is now recognized as the first Olympic Winter Games. As a globally watched quadrennial mega-event, the Winter Olympics is unique from both summer sport festivals and other winter festivals, such as the Winter X Games. This book explores the impacts, issues, and legacies of the past century of the Olympic Winter Games. Grounded in sport history, the chapters in this volume draw on the disciplines of cultural history, diplomatic history, global history, environmental history, and media history to analyze the continued allure of the Winter Olympics, a century after its origin, and in light of the sustained and significant problems facing the Olympic movement. Host cities’ efforts to create positive and lasting legacies are analyzed to highlight the challenges and complexities that have plagued the Olympic movement throughout the last century. The Olympic Winter Games at 100 is essential reading for any researcher, advanced student or scholar with an interest in Olympic Studies, sports development, sport policy and history. The chapters in this book were published as two special issues in The International Journal of the History of Sport.




Olympic Games as Performance and Public Event


Book Description

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




The Complete Book of the Winter Olympics


Book Description

"Published in anticipation of the 2014 Sochi Games, The Complete Book of the Winter Olympics has been expanded to include the rules and scoring for all the upcoming events. The book also looks at the history of each Olympic event from inception to the present day, including discontinued events and the four skating events first featured, before the creation of the Winter Olympics, in the 1908 London Summer Olympics. From speed skating to snowboarding, bobsled to ice hockey, the book gives the medals tables, timings, distances, and scores. But much more than a statistical compendium, the book also offers an abundance of Winter Olympic history, anecdotes, and lore, as authors David Wallechinsky and Jaime Loucky bring alive the most dramatic moments from the Games and celebrating the many extraordinary individuals who have competed."--Publisher's description.







Sex Testing


Book Description

In 1968, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) implemented sex testing for female athletes at that year's Games. When it became clear that testing regimes failed to delineate a sex divide, the IOC began to test for gender--a shift that allowed the organization to control the very idea of womanhood. Ranging from Cold War tensions to gender anxiety to controversies around doping, Lindsay Parks Pieper explores sex testing in sport from the 1930s to the early 2000s. Pieper examines how the IOC in particular insisted on a misguided binary notion of gender that privileged Western norms. Testing evolved into a tool to identify--and eliminate--athletes the IOC deemed too strong, too fast, or too successful. Pieper shows how this system punished gifted women while hindering the development of women's athletics for decades. She also reveals how the flawed notions behind testing--ideas often sexist, racist, or ridiculous--degraded the very idea of female athleticism.




A Team of Their Own


Book Description

A December Stephen Curry Book Club Pick One of ESPN’s 25 Can’t Miss Books of 2019 “A feel-good story.”—New York Times Book Review “This isn’t simply a sports book. Rather, it’s a book about inspiring and courageous women who just happened to be hockey players.”—Korea Times The inspiring, unlikely story of the American, Canadian, South Korean and even North Korean women who joined together to form Korea’s first Olympic ice hockey team. Two weeks before the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics, South Korea’s women’s hockey team was forced into a predicament that no president, ambassador or general had been able to resolve in the sixty-five years since the end of the Korean War. Against all odds, the group of young women were able to bring North and South Korea closer than ever before. The team was built for this moment. They had been brought together from across the globe and from a wide variety of backgrounds—concert pianist, actress, high school student, convenience store worker—to make history. Now the special kinship they had developed would guide them through the biggest challenge of their careers. Suddenly thrust into an international spotlight, they showed the powerful meaning of what a unified Korea could resemble. In A Team of Their Own, Seth Berkman goes behind the scenes to tell the story of these young women as they became a team amid immense political pressure and personal turmoil, and ultimately gained worldwide acceptance on a journey that encapsulates the truest meanings of sport and family.




Recent Evolutions and Perspectives in Olympic Winter Sports Performance: to PyeongChang and Beyond…


Book Description

An evidence-based scientific understanding of factors determining Olympic winter sports performance, recent changes, the evolution in training content and methods, the improvement in technology as well as the occurrence of injury and illness is required. On one hand, this would provide the opportunity to translate research to practice. On the other hand, to guide the practice of Olympic winter sports with the ultimate goal of improving the performance. Certainly, the continued evolution of Olympic winter sports has contributed to an enormous accumulation of knowledge, evidence, and relevant training technologies. Sports sciences, including physiology, conditioning, nutrition, biomechanics, coaching, psychology, as well as sport technology, history and social sciences, have much to contribute to the preparation of the athletes in the Olympic winter sports. Consequently, this Research Topic sought to provide a platform of contributions to set out a comprehensive framework of the components that should be addressed when developing training plans leading to elite Olympic winter sports performance. Overall, the papers were all directed toward a better understanding of physiological, biomechanical, and training factors related to different Olympic winter sports disciplines: cross-country skiing, alpine skiing, biathlon, Nordic combined, speed skating, snowboarding, and ski-cross.




Ski


Book Description




Historical Dictionary of the Olympic Movement


Book Description

The Olympic Movement began with the Ancient Olympic Games, which were held in Greece on the Peloponnesus peninsula at Olympia, Greece. It is not clear why the Greeks instituted this quadrennial celebration in the form of an athletic festival. The recorded history of the Ancient Olympic Games begins in 776 B.C., although it is suspected that the Games had been held for several centuries by that time. The Games were conducted as religious celebrations in honor of the god Zeus, and it is known that Olympia was a shrine to Zeus from about 1000 B.C. In modern time The Olympic Movement attempts to bring all the nations of the world together in a series of multisport festivals, the Olympic Games, seeking to use sport as a means to promote internationalism and peace. This fifth edition of Historical Dictionary of The Olympic Movement covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on the history, philosophy, and politics of the Olympics, major organizations, the various sports, the participating countries, and especially the athletes. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about The Olympic Movement.