Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics

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.