Waikiki Dreams: How California Appropriated Hawaiian Beach Culture

Patrick Moser

Compelling and innovative, Waik?k? Dreams opens up the origins of a defining California subculture.

Winters of Discontent: The Winter Olympics and a Half Century of Protest and Resistance

Edited by Russell Field

A first-of-its-kind collection, Winters of Discontent profiles the wide range of activists and social movements that have organized against the Winter Olympics.

Beyond the Black Power Salute: Athlete Activism in an Era of Change

Gregory J. Kaliss

How a generation of athletes changed the games and laid the groundwork for the activism roiling today’s sports world.

The Gold in the Rings: The People and Events That Transformed the Olympic Games

By Stephen R. Wenn and Robert K. Barney

Once a showcase for amateur athletics, the Olympic Games have become a global entertainment colossus powered by corporate sponsorship and professional participation. Stephen R. Wenn and Robert K. Barney offer the inside story of this transformation by examining the far-sighted leadership and decision-making acumen of four International Olympic Committee (IOC) presidents: Avery Brundage, Lord Killanin, Juan Antonio Samaranch, and Jacques Rogge.

Degrees of Difficulty: How Women’s Gymnastics Rose To Prominence and Fell From Grace

By Georgia Cervin

Electrifying athletes like Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci helped make women’s artistic gymnastics one of the most popular events in the Olympic Games. Georgia Cervin offers a unique history of women’s gymnastics, examining how the high-stakes diplomatic rivalry of the Cold War created a breeding ground for exploitation. Yet, a surprising spirit of international collaboration arose to decide the social values and image of femininity demonstrated by the sport.

Passing the Baton: Black Women Track Stars and American Identity

By Cat M. Ariail

Cat M. Ariail examines how athletes such as Alice Coachman, Mae Faggs, and Wilma Rudolph forced American sport cultures—both white and Black—to reckon with the athleticism of African American women. Their athletic success soon threatened postwar America’s dominant ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. As Ariail shows, the wider culture defused these radical challenges by locking the athletes within roles that stressed conservative forms of femininity, blackness, and citizenship.

Six Minutes in Berlin: Broadcast Spectacle and Rowing Gold at the Nazi Olympics

By Michael J. Socolow

The Berlin Games matched cutting-edge communication technology with compelling sports narrative to draw the blueprint for all future sports broadcasting. A global audience–the largest cohort of humanity ever assembled–enjoyed the spectacle via radio. As Michael J. Socolow shows, the origins of global sports broadcasting can be found in this single, forgotten contest, the rowing competition. In those origins we see the ways the presentation, consumption, and uses of sport changed forever.

The Revolt of the Black Athlete, 50th Anniversary Edition

By Harry Edwards

This Fiftieth Anniversary edition of Harry Edwards’s classic of activist scholarship offers a new introduction and afterword that revisits the revolts by athletes like Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos. Relating the rebellion of black athletes to a larger spirit of revolt among black citizens, Edwards moves his story forward to our era of protests, boycotts, and the dramatic politicization of athletes by Black Lives Matter.

Sex Testing: Gender Policing in Women’s Sports

By Lindsay Parks Pieper

When it became clear that testing regimes failed to delineate a sex divide, the International Olympic Committee began to test for gender. Lindsay Parks Pieper explores sex testing in sport from the 1930s to the early 2000s. 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.

“The Archaeology of Hellenism: Olympia and the Presence of the Past” by Peter J. Miller (Vol. 5, Issue 1)

Olympia holds a central place in conceptions of modern sport, Hellenism, and the Olympic Games. This article traces the concurrent development of the site and Panhellenism and Hellenism through its landscape, built environment, and its reception over the past 3,000 years.

“The Professionalization of the International Olympic Committee Administration” by Jean-Loup Chappelet (Vol. 3, Iss. 2)

Chappelet traces the IOC Administration’s rise from its humble beginnings being founded in Paris in 1894 and hiring its first staff member in the 1920s to the present day, now employing over 700 people from 71 nationalities. He shows how, under successive presidents and heads of administration, the IOC has followed four stages of the process of professionalization described in the sport management literature.

“The 1936 Olympic Dance Competitions, Canadian Settler Colonialism, and the Indigenous Absence” by Christine O’Bonsawin and Michael Heine (Vol. 3, Iss. 1)

Despite the substantial attention paid to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, the Internationale Tanzwettspiele of these Games has received nominal attention. The studies related to this relatively unknown episode focus on the ethnocentrism of aesthetic expression in dance as a cultural art form. This article seeks to shift the focus toward the importance of the Indigenous absence, placed in the context of Canadian settler colonialism.

“Viva Mexico! The Cultural Politics Behind the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Bid” by Edgar Jesus Campos and Douglas Hartmann (Vol. 4, Iss. 1)

Campos and Hartmann undergo a case study of the vision of Mexican history, identity, and culture that won the 1968 Summer Olympic Games for Mexico City. The Mexican elites’ portrayal of Mexico as a modern, cosmopolitan nation contributing to emerging global institutions and ideals in the postcolonial era ensured the bid’s success. The article’s core is a close reading of the official bid and bidding process.

“Olympic Agenda 2020 and Paris 2024: Driving Change or Rhetoric as Usual?” by Gustavo Lopes dos Santos and Marie Delaplace (Vol. 4, Iss. 2)

This article addresses the urban preparations for Paris 2024 and assesses their alignment with the new reforms. The objective is to identify difficulties in the implementation of the Olympic Agenda 2020 and to outline future research that can, potentially, enhance its efficiency.