The Games

Winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award.

From the ancient Greeks to today’s festival of sponsors – this is the definitive sporting, social and political history of the Olympic Games.

An excellent, pacy, anecdote-studded history of the modern Games – The Times

The Olympic Games have become the greatest show on earth. But how was such a ritual invented? Why did it prosper and how has it been so utterly transformed?

In The Games, sports historian David Goldblatt takes on a breathtakingly ambitious search for the answers and brilliantly unravels the complex strands of this history.

Beginning with the Olympics as a sporting side show at the great Worlds Fairs of the Belle Epoque and its transformation into a global media spectacular, care of Hollywood and the Nazi party. The Games shows how sport and the Olympics had been a battlefield during the Cold War, a defining moment for social and economic change in host cities and countries, and a theatre of resistance for women and athletes of colour once excluded from the show.

Filled with stories from over a century of Olympic competition – this amazingly researched history captures the excitement of sporting brilliance and the kaleidoscopic experience of the Games. It shows us how this sporting spectacle has come to reflect the world we hope to inhabit and the one we actually live in.