At the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games (held in 2021 due to COVID-19), the fifty-four African countries that participated finished the tournament with the lowest medal haul for any continent, continuing a historic trend since the inception of the modern Games in 1896. Reflecting this relative lack of sporting success, African Olympians-aside from elite ......
Born in 1888 in what would soon be Oklahoma Territory, Jim Thorpe was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation. After attending the Sac and Fox agency school and Haskell Indian Junior College in Lawrence, Kansas, he transferred to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. At Carlisle he led the football team to victories over some of the ......
The International Olympic Committee and the Salt Lake City Bid Scandal
In late 1998 and the early months of 1999, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was an organization in crisis. Revelations of a slush fund employed by Salt Lake City officials to secure votes from a number of IOC members in support of the city's bid for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games invited intense scrutiny of the organization by the ......
The Cold War was fought in every corner of society, including in the sport and entertainment industries. Recognizing the importance of culture in the battle for hearts and minds, the United States, like the Soviet Union, attempted to win the favor of citizens in nonaligned states through the soft power of sport. Athletes became de facto ......
Alma Richards, as an unsung high school student, surprisingly set an Olympic record for the high jump in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. He was the only native Utahn and member of the LDS church to win an Olympic gold medal in the twentieth century. After a stellar collegiate track career that saw him lead Cornell to three national championships, ......
Should sport be above politics and human rights? As London gets ready for the Olympics, Index on Censorship visits the ethical pit stops, asks whether sporting tournaments can be good for democracy and considers the appeal of championships to sports mad dictators - from Vladimir Putin to Alexander Lukashenko. With Mihir Bose giving the inside track on sport and ethics, Natalie Haynes Corinna Ferguson on new threats to the right to protest in the UK, Stephen Escritt and Martin Polley on brand control, Arnold van Bruggen and Rob Hornstra on Russia's winter challenge, and Leah Borromeo on what the Olympics mean for locals. Plus award-winning Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat, Salil Tripathi on censorship at literary festivals and reports on press freedom from Hungary, Dagestan and Mexico. Index on Censorship is an award-winning magazine, devoted to protecting and promoting free expression. International in outlook, outspoken in comment, Index on Censorship reports on free expression violations around the world, publishes banned writing and shines a light on vital free expression issues through original, challenging and intelligent commentary and analysis, publishing some of the world's finest writers. Winner 2008 Amnesty International Consumer Magazine of the Year
The original scheme for the modern Olympic Games was hatched at an international sports conference at the Sorbonne in June 1894. At the time, few provisions were made for the financial underwriting of the project-providence and the beneficence of host cities would somehow take care of the costs. For much of the first century of modern Olympic ......
Sport is the most universal feature of popular culture. It crosses language barriers and slices through national boundaries, attracting both spectators and participants, to a common lingua franca of passions, obsessions and desires. This book brings to light the connections between sport and culture. It argues that although sport is obviously ......
Sport is the most universal feature of popular culture. It crosses language barriers and slices through national boundaries, attracting both spectators and participants, to a common lingua franca of passions, obsessions and desires. This book brings to light the connections between sport and culture. It argues that although sport is obviously ......
