“Power Games: Political History Of The Olympics” Talk | SF

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Boykoff, a former member of the US Olympic soccer team, takes readers from the nineteenth-century origins of the modern Games, through its flirtations with Fascism, and into the contemporary era of corrupt, corporate control. Along the way he recounts vibrant alt-Olympics movements, like 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.

“A great irony is that modern Olympics, first envisioned as an alternative to war, have themselves become a form of low-intensity warfare. As Jules Boykoff chronicles in this path breaking history, host cities have used the Games to leverage urban renewal, neighborhood demolition, and mass population displacement. The preparations for the Rio Olympics have gone one step further and become literal urban counter-insurgency, as elite police units occupy and ‘cleanse’ one favela after another.” —Mike Davis, Planet of Slums

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