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National Identity And Global Sports Events: Culture, Politics, And Spectacle in the Olympics And the Football World Cup (S U N Y Series on Sport, Culture, and Social Relations)

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This is a collection of essays about the effects that major sports events have had on countries that hosted the events. The Olympics and Football World Cup are featured, and the authors of each essay explore different aspects of how each society reacted to some peculiar facet of the experience. In Argentina during the 1978 World Cup, a brutal repression of leftist dissidence was going on while the home country was battling for the trophy they eventually won. The author explains how the Cup experience unified even those being imprisoned and tortured with their right wing captors in the headiness of nationalist sports fervor. Similarly, another essay looks at the way South Korea's and Japan's peoples behaved during the joint World Cup they co-hosted in 2002; whereas the Japanese were reserved to the point of banning street viewings on large screen TVs of the matches, the Koreans enthusiastically embraced the tournament that saw their squad advance to the semi-finals. Some essays are more interesting than others, always an issue with such collections of varying writing skills. But all in all a useful summary of the cultural impact that global sports can have.