Olympic Glory Research Articles

A Hop, Step and a Jump from Olympic Glory, Harold Langley – Olympic Athlete, Paris 1924

A Hop, Step and a Jump from Olympic Glory, Harold Langley – Olympic Athlete, Paris 1924

On Olympic Victors, Ancient and Modern

During the 2016 Olympic games in Rio, the dialogue between the ancient and modern Olympics was enriched by the comparison between Leonidas of Rhodes (crowned 12 times at Olympia from 164 to 152 bc in the stadion, diaulos, and hoplitodromos) and the internationally acclaimed U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps (winner of 13 individual Olympic gold medals from 2004 to 2016). Decided by medal count, the two most decorated Olympic victors of all time seemed to abridge a cultural distance of 2168 years. After reviewing all extant sources about Leonidas of Rhodes, this paper examines three other exempla of Olympic victors, Diagoras of Rhodes (boxing, crowned 464 bc), Ladas of Argos (dolichos [5 km], crowned 460 bc), and Spiridon Louis (Marathon race, 1896 Athens Olympics), with special emphasis on the reception of their victories. In the cases of Diagoras and Ladas, my analysis identifies the analogies between a death sealed by Olympic glory and the paradigms of Tellos and Kleobis and Biton in Herodotos 1.31. The significance of Spiridon Louis’ victory for the nascent modern Greek state is discussed within the framework of the first Marathon race. By revisiting societal attitudes towards distinguished athletic winners then and now, this paper also engages in a discourse on the relationship between the ancient and modern Olympics.

Suffering in sport: why people willingly embrace negative emotional experiences

ABSTRACTNearly everyone agrees that physical pain is bad. Indeed, if anything merits the status of a platitude in our everyday thinking about value, the idea that pain is bad surely does. Equally, it seems clearly true that emotional suffering – despair, loneliness, grief, disappointment, guilt, shame, lovesickness, and the like – are all bad as well. We are strongly inclined to pity and feel sorry for those who suffer emotionally in these ways; we are motivated, at least some of the time, to do what we can to alleviate their suffering. Given this, it might seem curious that pain and suffering are so integral to sport – whether one is a participant or a spectator. There’s nothing particularly puzzling about pain and suffering that is inadvertently related to sport – as when an athlete injures her hamstring and has to miss her chance at Olympic glory, or when supporters face the misery of getting up at 6am because an away game has been scheduled to start at noon. But there does seem to be something curious about the extent to which pain and suffering are voluntarily embraced by participants and spectators, as the quotation from Nick Hornby aptly illustrates. Why do people willingly engage in something that brings about so much suffering? In this paper, I’ll attempt to answer this question.1

Print to Podium: Exploring Media Coverage of 2016 Olympic Athletes’ Perceptions About the Zika Virus

The 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, thrust potential Olympians into the midst of the unprecedented outbreak of the Zika virus. Because parasocial interaction theory purports that athletes can have tremendous influence on fans’ attitudes and behavior, particularly in the context of public health, it is important to understand how media framed athletes’ response to their risk of contracting Zika at the Games and the possibility of a global epidemic. To understand how athletes’ safety concerns were portrayed by news outlets, the authors conducted a framing analysis of articles reporting on the intersection of the Olympics and Zika published inThe New York Times,Los Angeles Times,Wall Street Journal, andWashington Postbetween January and November of 2016. This analysis revealed that media employed three main frames in their coverage of athletes: Athletes perceived the risk of Zika as small compared with potential Olympic glory, the decision to participate in the Games is an athletes’ personal choice between family and career, and athletes used Zika concerns as a convenient excuse to pull out of a troubled Games. The combination of these frames painted a contradictory portrait of athletes’ risk perception, both emphasizing and downplaying the threat of contracting the virus at the Games and an ensuing worldwide outbreak. These conflicting athlete narratives could have created uncertainty regarding the actual safety risk of the Zika virus and the Olympic Games for the fans who admire the athletes.

Japan and the 2012 London Olympics: Ambitions and Anxieties of a Nation Aspiring to Reprise Olympic Glory

This essay draws the contours of the Japanese response to the 2012 London Olympics and the Games' perceived relevance to Japan's sports administration in the coming decades. The analysis is based on Japanese mass media reports and press commentaries that appeared in Japan's four leading national dailies (Asahi, Mainichi, Yomiuri and Sankei) and the Nippon Keizai Shinbun (Nikkei; the Japanese equivalent of the Wall Street Journal) before, during and in the aftermath of the London Olympic Games.

Why science and synchronized swimming should not be Olympic sports

The brief, for my intermittent comment column for Genome Biology, was to give a UK perspective while keeping it interesting for an international audience. That's a tough brief. There is little reason for people to take an interest in events taking place in a rainy windswept island, famous mostly for bad food, greedy bankers and reality shows. Recently, though, because of the London 2012 Olympics, the focus of the world's attention has briefly flitted in our direction. So, while basking in our reflected Olympic glory, I will start with sport. In the UK we can be rightly proud of the fact that (as the head of the International Olympic Committee pointed out) we as a nation have done much to codify many Olympic sports. But this probably points to a national failing: we love rules, we love measuring performance and hence we love inventing sports. That's why we invented cricket; it has loads of obscure rules and loads of complex performance statistics. A game that can take 5 days and has to stop for rain or bad light (in England!) was not invented for the drama or spectacle. Our obsession with performance metrics is not just limited to sport; the government has taken to measuring and publishing the performance of everything from schools and hospitals to police forces and train operators. They have even tried to quantify our national happiness (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/wellbeing/measuring-national-well-being/summary-of-proposed-domains-and-measures/summary-of-proposed-domains-and-measures-of-national-well-being.html). Sportsmen and -women can obsess about measuring their performance and gauging it against their past performance and the performance of others, but researchers are quite different. In academia we don't like other people judging what we do (or even defining what we do) and we tend not to like metrics designed to measure our performance. But many years ago, UK government decided to ignore these protestations from our ivory towers and created a mechanism for measuring research quality called the Research Excellence Framework (or REF for short). REF is the reason that some readers may have noticed UK-based collaborators acting increasingly strangely, maybe looking stressed and distant, obsessing about impact factors and questioning the value of everything they do against impenetrable metrics.

What's The Gendered Story? Vancouver's Prime Time Olympic Glory on NBC

Previous Olympic media studies have shown that NBC's Winter Olympic telecast is far more likely to promote and advance men athletes and sports than women athletes and sports (see Billings, 2008b), and this study of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic telecast again reveals gender divisions. Analysis of all 64 hours of NBC's prime time telecast revealed that (a) when excluding mixed-gender pair competitions, men received more than three-fifths of the remaining airtime, (b) 75% of the most-mentioned athletes were men, and (c) sportscasters again employed dialogue differences in key areas including that men were more likely than women to be portrayed as succeeding because of their experience, while women were more likely than men to be depicted as succeeding because of courage and failing because they lacked commitment. Contextualization is also offered related to intervening factors such as (a) Olympic participation rates and (b) U.S. medal successes by gender.

Outside the Box

![][1] The nearest I got to Olympic glory was the national development squad for the 1988 Commonwealth Games triathlon team, from which I withdrew prematurely with what my coach insisted on calling a ‘spectacularly ill-timed pregnancy’. Perhaps that's why I ‘backed the bid’ for London 2012 and signed up as a volunteer long before I began to ask critical questions about what the Olympic brand actually means. Even in an Olympic year, almost all sports hold a world championship as well. The Olympics are less about finding a champion than about putting on a sporting mega-event — … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif

From Barcelona to Athens (1992–2004): ‘Juguo Tizhi’ and China's quest for global power and Olympic glory

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The Beijing Organising Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, Collection of the Documents for the Bid of the 2008 Olympics. 2. For example, between 1990 and 1999, only 1.88% of the national and provincial sport budget was invested in mass sport programmes. 3. Wu, The History of Sport of the PRC, 49. 4. Sports Ministry, ‘Strategy of Winning Medals at the Olympics (1994–2000)’, 6 July 1995, 1. 5. Ibid. 6. Fan, Wu, and Xiong, ‘Beijing Ambitions: An Analysis of the Chinese Elite sport System and its Olympic Strategy for the 2008 Olympic Games’, 26. 7. Wu, The History of Sport of the PRC, 364. 8. Sports Ministry, ‘Strategy of Winning Medals at the Olympics (2001–2010)’. 9. Fan, Mackay, and Cristensen, China Gold: China's Quest for Global Power and Olympic Glory. 10. Ibid. 11. Zhang, ‘The Reform and Open-up and Chinese Sport?’, 4. 12. ‘State Council's Plan of System Reform’, People's Daily, 11 March 1998. 13. Ibid. 14. Sports Ministry, Sport in China since the Reform and Opening-up, 242. 15. Ibid., 243. 16. Huang, ‘Foreign Coaches served the Chinese Olympic Squad’, Yangzi Evening Post, 26 August 2008. 17. Jie Su, ‘Where is the Way Out for Them? The Hard Life of Retired Athletes’, Xinhua, http://news.xinhuanet.com/sports/2005-08/24/content_3395074.htm (accessed 18 June 2010). 18. Ibid. 19. Sports Ministry, Sport in China since the Reform and Opening-up. 20. Deng, ‘From Bound Feet to Olympic Gold in China: The Case of Women's Chinese Table Tennis’. 21. Fan, Fan, and Lu, ‘Changes in Chinese Sports Policy: Pre-and Post-Beijing Olympic Games’. 22. Sports Ministry, the State Commission Office for Public Sector Reform, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Human Resource and the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, ‘Suggestions on the Re-employment of Retired Athletes’, 29 September 2002. National Sports Archives, the Sports Ministry, Beijing. 23. The Ministry of Education established the ‘Standard for University Recruit Students with Sport Talent’ in 2006. 24. Fan, Fan, and Lu, ‘Changes in Chinese Sports Policy: Pre-and Post-Beijing Olympic Games’. 25. Interview of a former Sports Ministry official by the author, 18 July 2010. 26. Filip Bondy, ‘Barcelona: Swimming; Going got Gold, Thompson Says She “Choked”’, The New York Times, 27 July 1992. 27. Editorial Team of the Yearbook of Chinese Sport, Yearbook of Chinese Sport (1992–1993). 28. Yang Chuan-kwang won the silver medal in the decathlon at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, making him the first ever Taiwan athlete to win an Olympic silver medal. 29. Sports Ministry, Sport in China since the Reform and Opening-up, 93–94. 30. ‘1996: Bomb rocks Atlanta Olympics’, BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/27/newsid_3920000/3920865.stm (accessed 6 June 2010). 31. ‘Full Text of Eric Rudolph's Confession: NPR’, NPR (National Public Radio), http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4600480 (accessed 6 June 2010), paragraph 18. 32. Wang claimed the world title in the 10,000 m in Stuttgart, Germany in 1993. She also won the World Cup Marathon Championships in late 1993. She was awarded the Jesse Owens prize in 1994 and became the first Chinese and Asian athlete to win the prize. She began to train under coach Mao Dezhen to prepare for the 1996 Olympics. See ‘Magic Oriental Deer’, Hunan Satellite Channel, 15 March 2005, http://www.hunantv.com/lanmu/story/huigu/news_60.htm 33. Sports Ministry, Sport in China since the Reform and Opening-up, 95. 34. Editorial Team of the Yearbook of Chinese Sport, Yearbook of Chinese Sport (1997). 35. Hong Kong's sovereignty was transferred to China in 1997. 36. Reporter, ‘Taiwanese Spectators Arrested’, The Washington Post, 1 August 1996. 37. Liu, ‘Promote Chinese Athletes' Spirit’, 4–5. 38. Ibid. 39. Yibin Song, ‘The United States Crowned the Champion. China Achieved Great Success’, Zaobao, 4 October 2000. 40. Li, Touch China – China's Success at the Sydney Olympics. 41. ‘Summing-up Meeting of the Chinese Olympic Delegation’, Zaobao, 5 October 2000. 42. Xu, Olympic Dreams China and Sports 1895–2008. 43. ‘Summing-up Meeting of the Chinese Olympic Delegation’. 44. Xiaguang Wang, Hongshen Zhen, and Xuejiang Li, ‘The 27th Olympics Finished’, People's Daily (Overseas Edition), 2 October 2000. 45. ‘Dragon Rise in the East – The Olympics Witnessed the Transformation of China’, Chongqing Business Daily, 3 October 2000. 46. ‘The Age Scandal Humiliated China’, Qianshan Evening Echo, 30 April 2010. 47. ‘China “Accept” Decision to Strip Them of Olympic Bronze’, BBC. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/other_sports/gymnastics/8649850.stm (accessed 2 August 2010). 48. ‘Brave Liu Xiang Did It! Chinese Fans Jubilant’, China Daily, 28 August 2004. 49. Reporter, ‘Chinese Women Back to Top Volleyball World’, News Guangdong, http://www.newsgd.com/specials/athensgames/athensgamesnews/200408290001.htm (accessed 2 August 2010). 50. Ibid. 51. Tracey Holmes, ‘China takes the Olympic limelight’, CNN (Cable News Network), http://edition.cnn.com/2004/SPORT/08/30/athens.games/ (accessed 2 August 2010), paragraph 13. 52. Fan, Mackay, and Cristensen, China Gold: China's Quest for Global Power and Olympic Glory, 7–8.

Sport and politics in the 1980s: the Olympic Strategy

Sport and politics in the 1980s: the Olympic Strategy

Tokyo's 1964 Olympic design as a ‘realm of [design] memory’

This essay examines the graphic design of the Tokyo 1964 Games as a symbolic site through which Japan's postwar identity was re-articulated in relation with both the realm of internationalization and tradition. The visual language utilized by the Tokyo Games adhered to the anti-historical approach of modernism, while it also encoded the visual composition of crest design, established in medieval Japan. In encoding their tradition in not directly decipherable means, postwar Japanese designers found an important resource for distinguishing their identity in the international arena, and for establishing a continuity with their past. In the years following the Olympics, their designs were recognized as instigators of an international design scene, becoming also reminiscent of the 1964 Olympic glory days. On the other hand, they also encapsulated memories of the nation that acted on a visceral level, echoing Japanese society's fluctuation between tradition and modernity, nationalism and internationalism, past and future.

The Research on Application of Information Technology in sports Stadiums

With the Olympic glory in the national fitness program planning and the smooth development of China, the public's concern for the sport continues to grow, while their physical health is also increasingly fervent desired, the country launched a modern technological construction of sports facilities. Information technology applications in the sports venues in the increasingly wide range of modern venues and facilities, including not only the intelligent application of office automation systems, intelligent systems and sports facilities, communication systems for event management, ticket access control system, contest information systems, television systems, Command and Control System, but also in action including the use of computer technology, image analysis, computer-aided training athletes, sports training system and related data entry systems, decision support systems.Using documentary data method, this paper focuses on the research on application of information technology in Sports Stadiums, and try to explore its future trends.With a view to promote the growth of China's national economyand,so as to improve the students’quality and promote the cause of Chinese sports.

How a Soccer Stadium Helps with an Education in Science and Seismology

neering undergraduate students from the university’s Faculty of Engineering. Several researchers teach a number of math, physics, geophysics, and seismology-related courses and are often on the lookout for undergraduate students whom they can recruit for their research activities. Conversely, a student might reach out to the researcher and indicate an interest in extending his or her activities beyond the classroom. Senior students who are more versed in the disciplines of geophysics often know which field they would like to extend their activities into and are more readily absorbed into some research group. However, if the student is still at an early stage in his or her degree, finding suitable activities for him or her is more challenging because of the student’s limited knowledge of the underlying physics and underdeveloped mathematical toolkit. Here we will discuss the experiences gained from such a case in which, under an adviser’s guidance, a student undertook a very simple yet enlightening research project in seismology at the middle of his degree in geophysics engineering. We will show how the project aided the student in preparing and devel oping basic scientific research methodologies, critical analysis capabilities, and essential seismological tools for a more serious investigation in seismology and tectonophysics that was to hap pen later as part of his undergraduate thesis. THE PROJECT With the intent of designing a research experience that was fun and engaging, yet scientifically sound, an old project that was almost a rumor was resurrected. The National Seismological Service (SSN), operated for the Mexican government by the IG, has a broadband network throughout the country. One of the stations, CUIG, is located in a vault within UNAM’s main campus in southern Mexico City. A basaltic masonry sta dium, built to host the 1968 Olympics with a seating capacity of 63,000, is located 1.5 km away from the seismometer (Figure 1). The Olympic glory is all but faded now, but the stadium still hosts one of the most popular teams in the Mexican profes

The government's role in China's Olympic glory

This article examines the determinants of China's Olympic success by drawing on provincial-level data. We find that it is government spending on sports, rather than per capita income, that has the greatest impact on this success. Our findings suggest that government involvement is still the most fundamental feature of sports organization in China.

Jews and the Olympic Games: The Clash between Sport and Politics , and: Barney Ross (review)

PAUL TAYLOR. Jews and the Olympic Games: The Clash between Sport and Politics. Brighton and Portland, Oreg.: Sussex Academic Press, 2004. Pp. xi + 268.DOUGLAS CENTURY. Barney Ross. Jewish Encounters. New York: Nextbook-Schocken, 2006. Pp. xvii + 216.Neither Paul Taylor's look at Jewish participation in - and problems with - the modern Olympic Games nor Douglas Century s sympathetic biography of the boxer Barney Ross appreciably advances serious study of the intersection between modern Jewish life and the world of sports. Over the past decade or so, significant strides have been made in raising Jewish sports books beyond the apologetic and celebratory tomes that for so long characterized this area of research. Rather than listing Jewish sports achievers and champions or recounting those heroes most famous performances, the better works now appearing in this field use the metaphor of Jewish sports involvement to more fully understand the course of Jewish emancipation, the processes of group acculturation, gender differences, and the state of traditional Jewish practices and mores under conditions of freedom.Peter Levine's Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sports and the American Jewish Experience (New York, 1992) offered the first worthy synthetic treatment of athleticism s impact upon America Jewish immigrants and their children, focusing primarily on the games Jews played and the bouts fought in this country's great cities. Steven A. Riess' compendium Sports and the American Jew (Syracuse, N.Y., 1998) brought together a wealth of thoughtful scholarly articles, including the best piece written on what the trials and travails of the baseball slugger Hank Greenberg say about American Jewish status and self-image. More recently, Jack Kugelmass s collection, Jews, Sports and the Rites of Citizenship (Champlam, Ill.), and Michael Brenner's edited volume Emancipation through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe (Lincoln, Neb.), both from 2006, asked comparable , insightful questions about what sports activity tells us about level of Jewish integration in the modern world. Concomitantly, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute is taking a close look at how women s roles were affected and defined through the athletic realm. And I will immodestly add my own work , Judaism's Encounter with American Sports (Bloommgton, Ind., 2005). Unfortunately, Taylor and Century's books do not follow through on their promises to address many of these more complex and substantive issues comprehensively.Jews and the Olympic Games is the more disappointing of the two works. Taylor makes the obvious point that those with nefarious political ends have frequently exploited these international youthful gatherings that supposedly were to be venues for fair play and the promotion of understanding among peoples. As Taylor is clearly concerned with the tragic fate that world Jewry suffered in the past century, predictably the Berlin Olympiad of 1936 looms largest in his analysis. Accordingly, he recounts in substantial detail the oft-told saga of Hitler's attempt at propaganda victories and the victimization of Jewish athletes - both those who were barred from the German squad in violation of tacit international sports protocols and those American Jews denied their chances at Olympic glory - because their country's sports officials, many of whom were anti-Semites themselves, did not want to embarrass the Fuhrer with the sight of Jews on the victory stand. The 1972 Munich Games also occupy much of Taylor's attention as he reminds readers of the horrific political statement that Palestinian terrorists made when they tried to advance their cause on the international stage through the murder of eleven Israeli athletes.But Taylor wants to do more than to speak through sports of Jewish marginality in the pre-Holocaust world and of the unfavorable position Israel today occupies geopolitically. Writing in a triumphalist vein - so reminiscent of the old great Jews in sports historiography - he seeks to answer retrospectively the victimizers of Jews through recounting sagas of those who, through athletic excellence, put the lie to Hitler's racist-athlete theories. …

Analysing China's Drive for Olympic Success in 2008

The eyes of the world will be on Beijing in 2008 as China hosts the summer Olympic Games for the first time. A major criterion of success for China will be the ability of its athletes to win (large numbers of) Olympic medals. Yet, although there is a growing literature that explores the experiences of Western nations in their attempts to construct systems for supporting elite (Olympic) athlete development, we have very little in-depth information in this regard about China. Therefore, drawing on a framework of ten elements considered crucial for Olympic success in the West, this article explores China's construction of an elite development system as it strives for Olympic glory in Beijing. Our analysis reveals that there is a remarkable degree of similarity in the mechanisms in place in China with those evident in (Western) nations as diverse as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. At the same time, however, it is also evident that subtle ‘domestic' (national) variations are apparent in the implementation of these mechanisms in China, thus indicating the significance of a nation's political and cultural histories and traditions.

Sport management reform, national competitiveness and Olympic glory in the People's Republic of China

The paper traces the People's Republic of China's (PRC) efforts to modernize its public sector through economic reforms, and explores the effects of these on the country's sport structures. More specifically the research reported here investigates the nature of the sport management reforms and how these were linked to efforts to attract the Olympic games. The research draws on the conceptual framework of new managerialism, organizational analyses of Chinese organizations and culture specific accounts of organizational realities in the PRC. The data collected from interviews, observations and other documents was qualitatively analysed and the findings give evidence of modernization of sport structures over the last twenty years as well as some persistent outdated practices and management inexperience. The discussion on the development of the sport industry also reveals how the economic reforms helped the PRC' s Olympic bids. With the preparation for the forthcoming 2008 Beijing Olympics well under way, the pressure is on for further accelerated modernization.

THE OLYMPICS THAT GOT REAL? TELEVISION'S STORY OF SARAJEVO

Qualitative analysis of 1,240 references to previous and future Olympics throughout the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, supplemented by personal interviews with five CBS production executives, revealed CBS's implied sanctioning of a political message about Sarajevo and the Bosnian War. Valent references to Sarajevo took the form of direct pleas to stop the fighting, calls for aid to victims, calls for remembering Sarajevo's past, stories of escape from the war zone, and images of the war's devastation, especially of the ruined sites of former 1984 Olympic glory. Although CBS's aims were commercial, it contextualized the war as an emotionally laden human-interest story rather than a military or political event.