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.

Jules Boykoff is the author of Activism and the Olympics, Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games, Landscapes of Dissent, and Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States, among others. He is a professor of politics and government at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.