Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics - Softcover

Jules Boykoff

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1784780723 ISBN 13: 9781784780722

Publisher: Verso Books, 2016

Synopsis

The Olympics have not always been the commercialised juggernaut we know today, but as Jules Boykoff makes clear in this story-filled and devastating history, the Games have since their inception had a thoroughly checkered political history. Pierre de Coubertin, the aristocrat who gave birth to the modern Olympics, was against allowing women to participate, and allowed African countries to participate only to offset their individual laziness. Boykoff, a former member of the US Olympic soccer team, takes readers from the nineteenth-century origins of the modern Games, through its flirtations with Fascism, and into the contemporary era of corrupt, corporate control. Along the way he recounts vibrant alt-Olympics movements, like the Workers games and Womens Games of the 1920s and 1930s to the Gay Games of the 1980s through today.

About this title

Review:

“Jules Boykoff tells an Olympic history that simply hasn't been told. If we are going to have a more just future, we need to have an honest accounting of the past. Thank you Jules, for setting it straight and being right on time.” – Dr. John Carlos, (1968 Olympic medal winner)

“A great irony is that the modern Olympics, first envisioned as an alternative to war, have themselves become a form of low-intensity warfare. As Jules Boykoff chronicles in this pathbreaking history, host cities have used the Games to leverage urban renewal, neighborhood demolition, and mass population displacement. The preparations for the Rio Olympics have gone one step further and become a literal urban counterinsurgency, as elite police units occupy and ‘cleanse’ one favela after another.” – Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums

“Jules Boykoff takes us deep into the heart of the Olympic industry to look at the experiences of the people most affected by the Games – you and me. Power Games chronicles a wide range of resistance efforts, including Indigenous people who have struggled to defend their lands and rights against the Olympic juggernaut, showing us how all of our interests are intertwined. A must read” – Janice Forsyth, former Director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies at Western University in Ontario, member of the Fisher River Cree First Nation

“Jules Boykoff, arguably the world’s leading authority on the Olympic Games, skillfully details how the Olympics benefit political elites and corporate interests at the expense of host cities and even democracy itself. But this is no pessimistic account. Boykoff ends by outlining how a more democratic and transparent Olympics is still possible.” – Ben Carrington, University of Texas at Austin, author of Race, Sport and Politics

“Enjoyable and informative, Power Games is an even more relevant read in the build-up to this summer’s first-ever Latin American Olympics.” – Morning Star

“Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics exposes the underside of the modern Olympic Games. The text is an important read for those who will be watching this summer’s contests in Rio. Even more importantly, though, it is a necessary text for those who live in cities the International Olympic Committee is eyeing for its next overpriced neoliberal capitalist extravaganza. The people of Boston sent the IOC packing in 2015 for many of the reasons elucidated in this history. Other cities would do well to do the same. This book explains why.” – Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch

“This explosive book leaves us asking whether the IOC’s insistence that sport is above such concerns as justice, liberty and human rights has not in fact been a fundamentally corrosive stance from the start.” – Sunday Herald

“[Power Games is] really two books in one: a historical overview of the Games’ checkered history and a searing indictment of the IOC’s hypocrisy and hubris...unrelentingly critical [and also] constructive.” – Jacobin

“A truly inside-track critique of the fanfare, Boykoff addresses the games as a site of scandal and rebellion.” – Bailey Flynn, MobyLives!


"By examining Olympic history from the revival of the Games in 1896 to the imminent Rio Olympics, Boykoff traces how the Olympics have developed into the behemoth that has transformed Rio over the past seven years. Beyond this, he also provides fantastic detail on many of the egregious abuses in the name of Rio 2016." Adam Talbot, RioOnWatch

“Should be on every Olympian’s bookshelf.” – Laurence Halsted, fencer and “Team GB” Olympian at Rio 2016

“As much a tool for activists as a work of scholarship, [Power Games] relentlessly attacks the hypocrisy of the Olympic myth.” – Aram Goudsouzian, Washington Post

“Jules Boykoff, whose jaunty polemic Power Games is billed as a political history of the Olympics. It is actually more of a call-to-arms to people faced with this giant intrusion” – Matthew Engel, Financial Times

“A timely and depressing reminder of the grisly underbelly of the Olympic Game” – Diarmaid Ferriter, Irish Times

“To anyone who believes that the excesses of the Games over the past 50 years or so have betrayed a purer original legacy, [Power Games] by Jules Boykoff provides a bracing corrective.” – Spectator

“Jules Boykoff debunks any remaining myths associated with the ‘spirit’ and ‘goodwill’ of the Olympic ‘movement’ by attending closely to the machinations of this monopolistic, non-sovereign, and largely unaccountable organization and its beneficiaries.” – Public Books

“As sporting mega-events become the focus of a growing number of activists, Power Games provides the basis for those campaigns to be better informed and more effective.” – Malcolm Maclean, Red Pepper

About the Author:

Jules Boyk off is an academic, author, and former professional soccer player. He is the author of Activism and the Olympics, Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games, Landscapes of Dissent, Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States, among others. He has been called 'one of the biggest names in international Olympic Games academia'. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he has been interviewed on the BBC and Democracy Now! He is a professor of Politics and Government at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1784780723
• ISBN 13: 9781784780722
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216