Title/Author:
“The Gold in the
Rings: The People and Events that Transformed the Olympic Games” by Stephen R.
Wenn and Robert Barney
Tags:
Olympics, business,
history
Publish date:
January 9, 2020
Length:
360 pages
Rating: to
3 ½ of 5 stars (good)
Review:
The original concept
of the modern Olympic Games was, ideally, to showcase amateur athletes. That has
now been replaced with the Games being viewed as a spectacle of commercialism,
professionalism and glamour, especially for the hosting city. How this transformation
took place and the people behind it is the subject of this book by two
well-respected university professors.
As one might expect,
this book is written in a style that is befitting a scholarly work with much
detail and much research. It is not one
that can be picked up and enjoyed on a lazy afternoon. The reader will have many different names,
acronyms and situations come at him so quickly that it may be very confusing at
first. However, the subject matter is
worth the time it takes to carefully absorb the information because it is very
interesting.
The reader will learn
about the presidents of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) from Avery
Brundage, who valiantly fought to keep the "purity" of the Games
alive and minimize, if not outright ban, any commercialism from creeping into
the games. His war of words and later
legal action against a businessman in Los Angeles who used the 1932 games
hosted by that city for promoting bread makes for one of the best stories in
the book, even better than the biggest one for scandal, the bribery and other
events in the saga of naming Salt Lake City as the host of the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Of course, a book on
the growing revenue and commercialism of the Olympics has to include the other
time Los Angeles hosted the Games, 1984, and the wildly economically successful
Games led by Peter Ueberroth. While that
is commonly considered to be a big turning point in the change of the Olympic spirit,
it certainly is not the only factor in this swing, and the subsequent chapters
up to the current games that will be held in Tokyo now in 2021 illustrate this
change. A reader will just have to make
sure that he or she absorbs this slowly and carefully and at that point, it
will be realized that the Olympics have gone a profound change in a relatively short
amount of time.
I wish to thank
University of Illinois Press for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley in
exchange for an honest review.
Book Format Read:
E-book (Kindle)
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