The United States uses the Olympic Games to construct and contest its national image. For more than a century the Olympics have served the U.S. as a site for erecting memorials to American patriotism and developing mythologies of American exceptionalism.

This scholarly contribution to the study of sport in films is one of the first of its kind to examine how sport has been used in movies and documentaries as a metaphor for other areas of social life, including insights into the representation of social identities, politics, consumerism and violence

This collection illustrates the expansiveness of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of sport. The essays consider sports in their social, economic, cultural and political aspects.

The essays that comprise this book mark new territory in the study of sport in the Hispanic world, a key site of cultural experience for the populations of Latin America, the United States and the Iberian Peninsula. The scope of the volume is the exploration of the representation and interaction of sport / text / body in a variety of cultural forms in Latin America, Spain and the chicano population of the USA. As such, it opens a path for further study of an area that is experiencing significant growth in the international academic community. The book consists of 11 chapters by different...

This book provides a ‘state of the art’ review of the academic study of cricket. It defines the current state of the field and will serve as the springboard for future research and scholarship of the game.

The Balkan Games resulted on the one hand from the growth of modern European sport and the unsatisfactory performances of the Balkan athletes at national and international level, and on the other hand, from a desire to bring the Balkan peoples together in peace and concord. The Games were initiated in Athens in 1929 and increasingly became an integral part of the political, cultural and social life of the area. The common global reality is that when an athletic event is staged, attempted friendship seldom receives priority. In the 1930s, however, the Balkan Games provided a rare example of...

For more than a century, the Olympics have been the modern world's most significant sporting event. Indeed, they deserve much credit for globalizing sport beyond the boundaries of the Anglo-American universe, where it originated, into broader global realms. By the 1930s, the Olympics had become a global mega-event that occupied the attention of the media, the interest of the public and the energies of nation-states. Since then, projected by television, funded by global capital and fattened by the desires of nations to garner international prestige, the Olympics have grown to gargantuan...