The Olympics that Never Happened

The Olympics that Never Happened PDF

Author: Adam Berg

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2023-02-14

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1477326472

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A look back at how powerful politicians, business leaders, and a diverse cast of activists used a thwarted Olympics to shape the state of Colorado and the city of Denver. If you don’t recall the 1976 Denver Olympic Games, it’s because they never happened. The Mile-High City won the right to host the winter games and then was forced by Colorado citizens to back away from its successful Olympic bid through a statewide ballot initiative. Adam Berg details the powerful Colorado regime that gained the games for Denver and the grassroots activism that brought down its Olympic dreams, and he explores the legacy of this milestone moment for the games and politics in the United States. The ink was hardly dry on Denver’s host agreement when Mexican American and African American urbanites, white middle-class environmentalists, and fiscally concerned local politicians realized opposition to the Olympics provided them new political openings. The Olympics quickly became a platform for taking stands on a range of issues, from conservation to urban livability to the very idea of growth, which for decades had been unquestioned in Colorado. The Olympics That Never Happened argues that hostility to the Olympics galvanized and empowered diverse citizens in a major US city, with long-term ramifications for Colorado and political activism elsewhere. The Olympics themselves were changed forever, compelling organizers to take seriously competing interests from subgroups within their communities.

The Olympics that Never Happened

The Olympics that Never Happened PDF

Author: Adam Berg

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2023-02-14

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1477326456

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A look back at how powerful politicians, business leaders, and a diverse cast of activists used a thwarted Olympics to shape the state of Colorado and the city of Denver.

Dream Fights - Great Boxing Matches Which Never Happened

Dream Fights - Great Boxing Matches Which Never Happened PDF

Author: Sam Dalton

Publisher: BookRix

Published: 2022-11-26

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 3755426005

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This book is all about dream fights between fighters who fought in the SAME era. The fights that follow (with the exception of our battle between the Klitschko brothers - a fight their mother would never have sanctioned!) COULD have happened and in many cases SHOULD have happened but for some reason or other simply failed to transpire. What would have happened if Lennox Lewis had fought Riddick Bowe or Mike Tyson had battled the comebacking George Foreman? Who would have won if Pernell Whitaker had fought Terry Norris or Salvador Sánchez and Eusebio Pedroza had engaged in a featherweight unification bout? We'll also consider what might have happened if Sugar Ray Leonard had fought Aaron Pryor and Marvin Hagler had fought the great Wilfred Benitez. We'll shall also delve further back in time and speculate on what would have happened if Jack Dempsey fought Harry Wills and how Rocky Marciano would have fared if he'd delayed his retirement to fight the young Floyd Patterson. There's plenty more besides this in the book. We'll also discuss what might have happened if Britain's domestic legends Nigel Benn and Chris Eubank had tangled with - respectively - the American superstars Roy Jones Jr and James Toney and we'll also take a look at the proposed late 1990s/early 2000s fight between Prince Naseem Hamed and Floyd Mayweather Jr which Bob Arum tried to make. We'll also consider what might have happened if Muhammad Ali had fought the Cuban Olympic legend Teófilo Stevenson in the 1970s. All this and much much more awaits in Dream Fights - Great Boxing Matches Which Never Happened...

No Boston Olympics

No Boston Olympics PDF

Author: Chris Dempsey

Publisher: University Press of New England

Published: 2017-05-02

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1512600709

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In 2013 and 2014, some of Massachusetts' wealthiest and most powerful individuals hatched an audacious plan to bring the 2024 Summer Olympics to Boston. Like their counterparts in cities around the world, Boston's Olympic boosters promised political leaders, taxpayers, and the media that the Games would deliver incalculable benefits and require little financial support from the public. Yet these advocates refused to share the details of their bid and only grudgingly admitted, when pressed, that their plan called for billions of dollars in construction of unneeded venues. To win the bid, the public would have to guarantee taxpayer funds to cover cost overruns, which have plagued all modern Olympic Games. The United States Olympic Committee (USOC) chose Boston 2024's bid over that of other American cities in January 2015-and for a time it seemed inevitable that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) would award the Games to Boston 2024. No Boston Olympics is the story of how an ad hoc, underfunded group of diverse and engaged citizens joined together to challenge and ultimately derail Boston's boosters, the USOC, and the IOC. Chris Dempsey was cochair of No Boston Olympics, the group that first voiced skepticism, demanded accountability, and catalyzed dissent. Andrew Zimbalist is a world expert on the economics of sports, and the leading researcher on the hidden costs of hosting mega-events such as the Olympics and the World Cup. Together, they tell Boston's story, while providing a blueprint for citizens who seek to challenge costly, wasteful, disruptive, and risky Olympic bids in their own cities.

Racism and the Olympics

Racism and the Olympics PDF

Author: Robert G. Weisbord

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-08

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1351494945

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Sports are the opiate of the people, particularly in the United States, Europe, and parts of South America. Globally, billions of fans feverishly focus on the summer and winter Olympics. In theory, international fraternalism is boosted by these "friendly competitions," but often national rivalries eclipse the theoretical amity. How the Olympics have dealt with racism over the years offers a window to better understanding these dynamics. Since their revival in 1896, the modern Olympics were periodically agitated by political and moral conundrums. Racial tensions, the topic of this volume, reached their apex under the polarizing presidency of Avery Brundage. Race in sports cannot be disentangled from societal problems, nor can race or sports be fully understood separately. Racial conflict must be contextualized. Racism and the Olympics explores the racial landscape against which a number of major disputes evolved. The book covers various topics and events in history that portray discrimination within Olympic games, such as the Nazi games of 1936, the black American protest on the victory stand in Mexico City's Olympics, as well as international political forces that removed South Africa and Rhodesia from the Olympics. Robert G. Weisbord considers the role of international politics and the criteria that should be used to determine nations that are selected to take part in and serve as venues for the Olympic Games.

Inside the Beijing Olympics

Inside the Beijing Olympics PDF

Author: Jeff Ruffolo

Publisher: eBookIt.com

Published: 2012-08-01

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1456609424

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As the only American in the senior management team of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games, Jeff Ruffolo takes you behind the scenes and into a world no one has ever before witnessed. This remarkable, first-person account of the Beijing Summer Olympic Games is a riveting narrative taking you inside the greatest Olympics ever! This true story recounts the author's effort to perfect the broadcasting of NCAA Volleyball on the fledgling Internet and commercial radio stations throughout the Western USA and how he parlayed that experience into becoming America's voice of Olympic Volleyball at the 1996 Atlanta, 2000 Sydney and 2004 Athens Summer Olympics and then finally securing a position with the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee. Follow the author as he maneuvers alone through unchartered and perilous waters in The People's Republic of China to become the Senior Expert of the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee and the personal challenges he faced as the 2008 Beijing Olympic Media Center managed one global media crisis after another. Be captivated by this fascinating tale of political intrigue, mystery and magic as you too will be transported ... Inside the Beijing Olympics.

The Event

The Event PDF

Author: Ilai Rowner

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2014-11

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 0803296509

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"What is an event? From a philosophical perspective, events are irregular occurrences--moments of change and interruption--categorized by human perception, language, and thought. While philosophers have pored over this subject extensively in recent years, The Event: Literature and Theory seeks to ground it: What is literature's approach to the event? How does literature produce and give testimony to events? Ilai Rowner's study not only revisits some of the most important thinkers of our time, including Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Martin Heidegger, it also develops a critical approach to literature that questions the meaning of the literary event through examinations of literary works by Marcel Proust, Louis-Ferdinand Ce;line, and T. S. Eliot. Rowner offers a new method of thinking about the particular characteristics of the event within literary works and defines the creative value of literature as the aspiration toward the un-happening within the happening. In this study the experience of literature--as an act of both writing and reading--becomes the struggle to capture the excessive movement of the event while yet revealing the creative energy within the work of literature. "--

The Games: A Global History of the Olympics

The Games: A Global History of the Olympics PDF

Author: David Goldblatt

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2016-07-26

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 0393254119

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“A people’s history of the Olympics.”—New York Times Book Review A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year The Games is best-selling sportswriter David Goldblatt’s sweeping, definitive history of the modern Olympics. Goldblatt brilliantly traces their history from the reinvention of the Games in Athens in 1896 to Rio in 2016, revealing how the Olympics developed into a global colossus and highlighting how they have been buffeted by (and affected by) domestic and international conflicts. Along the way, Goldblatt reveals the origins of beloved Olympic traditions (winners’ medals, the torch relay, the eternal flame) and popular events (gymnastics, alpine skiing, the marathon). And he delivers memorable portraits of Olympic icons from Jesse Owens to Nadia Comaneci, the Dream Team to Usain Bolt.

The Dirtiest Race in History

The Dirtiest Race in History PDF

Author: Richard Moore

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1408181568

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The men's 100m final at the 1988 Olympics has been described as the dirtiest race ever - but also the greatest. Aside from Johnson's blistering time, the race is infamous for its athletes' positive drug tests. This is the story of that race, the rivalry between Johnson and Lewis, and the repercussions still felt almost a quarter of a century on.