Kategoria BISAC: Sports & Recreation >> Cultural & Social Aspects

Since the dawn of athletic competition during the original Olympic Games in Ancient Greece, athletes, as well as their coaches and trainers, have been finding innovative ways to gain an edge on their competition. Some of those performance-enhancement methods have been within the accepted rules while other methods skirt the gray area between being within the rules and not, while still other methods break the established rules. In modern times, doping - the use of performance-enhancing drugs - has been one method athletes and their trainers have used to beat their competition. The history of...

Why do many athletes risk their careers by taking performance-enhancing drugs? Do the highly competitive pressures of elite sports teach athletes to win at any cost?

An Introduction to Drugs in Sport provides a detailed and systematic examination of drug use in sport and attempts to explain why athletes have, over the last four decades, increasingly used performance-enhancing drugs. It offers a critical overview of the major theories of drug use in sport, and provides a detailed analysis of the involvement of sports physicians in the development and use of...

This book adds to the growing body of work on the global politics of sport. Leading and emerging experts explore 21st Century sport, politics and society through the conceptual lenses of community, mobility and identity.

Ireland and its inhabitants have often been described as being 'sports mad'. As a relatively small geographical entity, Ireland, north and south, has produced a disproportionately high number of world class sports men and women who have excelled at the highest levels of their chosen sport. The significance of sport in Ireland though extends far beyond the achievements of such individuals. Sport has historically assumed a centrality in the lives of the island's inhabitants, a fact that can be measured by the numbers and commitment of participants as well as the emotional and financial...

The Making of Sporting Cultures develops a cultural historical approach to the study of sport, allowing for an appreciation of how sporting cultures are actively made by people as social agents and how sports become located within the 'common culture' of different nations across time.

A thorough, innovative yet entertaining and readable analysis of sport as an expression of the values and social relations of a nation. Covering the years between the two World Wars, the central place of sport in English life is brought into sharp focus, providing insight into issues of gender, class, religion and locality, ideas of morality, continuity and change, and what it meant to be English during this pivotal time.

Themes include:

• the nature of sport and its place in national life
• how sport was portrayed in the media and through the sports stars of...

'Whannel is a foundational figure in the study of sports and the media. ...For 20 years his writing has set a high standard ...and it remains an inspiration to many' - Toby Miller, Professor of Cultural Studies, New York University, USA

Garry Whannel's text Blowing the Whistle: The Politics of Sport broke new ground when it was first published in 1983. Its polemical discussion brought sports as cultural politics into the academic arena and set the agenda for a new wave of researchers.

Since the 1980s sport studies has...

How can or does youth sport reconcile what seems to be a fundamental contradiction between understandings of sport and disability? Has youth sport been challenged in anyway? Have alternative views of sport for disabled people been presented? Examining some of the latest research, this book considers the relationship between sport and disability by exploring a range of questions such as these.

Disability and Youth Sport further challenges current thinking and therefore serves to stimulate progressive debate in this area. Drawing on a breadth of literature from sports...

Taking examples from the United States and Canada, this comprehensive text offers compassionate and critical accounts of the Native American sporting experience. It challenges popular images of indigenous athletes and athletics; it explores Native American participation in and appropriation of EuroAmerican sports; and it unpacks social categories, particularly gender, race and heritage and their implications for understanding Native Americans and sport in North America. Contributors discuss the interplay of power and possibility, difference and identity, representation and remembrance that...

The state of Israel is a home for a widely diverse population from many different ethnic, religious, cultural and social backgrounds; a new society with ancient roots, which is still coalescing and developing today. Israeli sport, maybe more than any other cultural phenomenon, has changed radically since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Over the past six decades, Israeli sport has evolved from an amateur hobby of a few 'sports freaks', to a passion of the masses. The transformation to a major cultural phenomenon is the result of general developments in Israeli and...