The Olympics have a checkered, sometimes scandalous, political history. Jules Boykoff, a former US Olympic team member, takes readers from the event''s nineteenth-century origins, through the Games'' flirtation with Fascism, and into the contemporary era of corporate control. Along the way he recounts vibrant alt-Olympic movements, such as the Workers'' Games and Women''s Games of the 1920s and 1930s as well as athlete-activists and political movements that stood up to challenge the Olympic machine.
