Olympic Legacies: Intended and Unintended—Political, Cultural, Economic and Educational

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 dimensions.

In the course of its epic history, the Olympics have left numerous legacies, from unforgettable feats to monumental stadiums, from shining triumphs to searing tragedies, from the dazzling debuts on the world's stage of new cities and nations to notorious campaigns of national propaganda. The Olympics represent an essential component of modern global history. The Olympic movement itself has, since the 1990s, recognized and sought to shape its numerous legacies with mixed success as this book makes clear. It offers ground-breaking analyses of the power of Olympic legacies, positive and negative, and surveys the subject from Athens in 1896 to Beijing in 2008, and indeed beyond.

This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

J.A. Mangan is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Emeritus Professor, University of Strathclyde, Founding and Executive Academic Editor of The International Journal of the History of Sport and Founding Editor of the journals Sport in Society and Soccer and Society and the series Sport in the Global Society. His latest monograph, Soccer's Missing Men: Schoolteachers and the Spread of Association Football (with Colm Hickey) will be published by Routledge in 2009. A collection, Beijing 2008: Preparing for Glory - Chinese Challenge in the 'Chinese Century' (edited with Dong Jinxia) was published by Routledge in 2008.

Mark Dyreson is an associate professor of kinesiology and an affiliate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University and a former president of the North American Society for the History of Sport. With Routledge, he has published Crafting Patriotism for Global Dominance: America at the Olympics (2008) as well as editing, with J.A. Mangan, Sport and American Society: Insularity, Exceptionalism and 'Imperialism' (2007).