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A timely, no-holds barred, critical political history of the modern Olympic GamesThe Olympics have not always been the commercialized 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.



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