Customer Reviews

Power, Politics, and the Olympic Games

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Alfred Senn is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison History Dept., and that is where he first developed his course entitled "The Political History of the Modern Olympics." This book is the result of two decades of research and interviews of athletes, sports federation administrators, and Olympic officials beginning during the US boycott of the Moscow Games in 1980. This book is a comprehensive presentation of much of the information from his lectures, and forms the basic text of the course for undergraduate students. Readers within academia will benefit from its quality scholarship and solid documentation. The general public will enjoy its easy readability and gain a broader knowledge of the "behind the scenes" maneuvering and politicking of the leaders of international sport. What this book can offer that others often cannot is the view from the other side of the "Iron Curtain." Senn is a Soviet scholar by training and his book includes a large amount of material gathered exclusively from Soviet files and interviews, a resource closed to many other authors. In the final pages of the book he devotes considerable attention to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the athletic consequences of that disintegration for the Eastern European sports "machines." I strongly recommend this text to anyone wishing to expand his or her knowledge of the workings of the International Olympic Committee and the political conflicts that have arisen over the years within the Games themselves or the Olympic structure.

I read this book for my term paper for 8th grade on the Politics of the Olympics. We could choose any topic from history, so that's what I chose, because I'm a swimmer. It was really helpful and interesting. It's sad there's so much fighting that has nothing to do with the sports, but that's the way the world is. I wish I could take Prof. Senn's college course.