The Olympic Winter Games At 100

2024 marks the 100-year anniversary of the winter sports week festival celebrated in Chamonix in 1924, which is now recognized as the first Olympic Winter Games. As a globally watched quadrennial mega-event, the Winter Olympics is unique from both summer sport festivals and other winter festivals, such as the Winter X Games. This book explores the impacts, issues, and legacies of the past century of the Olympic Winter Games. Grounded in sport history, the chapters in this volume draw on the disciplines of cultural history, diplomatic history, global history, environmental history, and media history to analyze the continued allure of the Winter Olympics, a century after its origin, and in light of the sustained and significant problems facing the Olympic movement. Host cities’ efforts to create positive and lasting legacies are analyzed to highlight the challenges and complexities that have plagued the Olympic movement throughout the last century. The Olympic Winter Games at 100 is essential reading for any researcher, advanced student or scholar with an interest in Olympic Studies, sports development, sport policy and history. The chapters in this book were published as two special issues in The International Journal of the History of Sport.

Recounts memorable events from past Winter Olympic games from Eddie Eagan's gold medal in bobsledding at Lake Placid in 1932 to Tommy Moe's alpine skiing medal in 1994.

The only book devoted solely to chronicling the historic VIII Olympic Winter Games at Squaw Valley and Lake Tahoe.

Sometimes life is like a movie. There are moments and events in life - not often - that are as exciting and as dramatic as a movie. What happened in Lake Placid, New York in February 1980 at the Thirteenth Winter Olympics was such a time. For those who experienced it in person or watched the games on television, they remember where they were when the US hockey team beat the Soviet Union and then beat the team from Finland two days later to win the gold medal. The sports victory of an underdog group of college kids was thrilling enough but it was a win against the Soviet Union. This Cold War adversary was also the nation hosting the summer games later that year which the United States was threatening to boycott. The excitement and drama in Lake Placid gave the games a huge lift of enthusiasm and popularity when some had even come to believe that staging the Olympics was no longer affordable for many communities and that perhaps the 1980 Winter Games should be cancelled entirely. Indeed, as the games began, a US News and World Report magazine questioned whether the Lake Placid games were the "last Olympics." What happened on the hockey ice was improbable enough, but the Lake Placid Winter Games were a long shot, if not a miracle too. Winning the games had been an unlikely decades-long quest for this small town to overcome the barriers of exploding finances, environmental concerns and world politics. Few remember that the 1980 games were never supposed to take place in Lake Placid. They came to the small village because of unexpected events which unfolded and made the two weeks in the remote Adirondacks before a worldwide audience of nearly a billion viewers one of the most dramatic times in the modern era of sports, media and politics. It would not be too much of a stretch to say that the Lake Placid Games, which brought the "Miracle on Ice," saved the Winter Olympics in 1980 and greatly enhanced them for the future.

Providing the same breadth of information offered in The Olympics Factbook--licensed by the US Olympic Committee and issued to every 1992 Winter American Olympian--this all-new guide launches the reader into February, 1994, with facts, stats, rules, and profiles of the athletes. 100 photos.

At the first Winter Games in Chamonix, France in 1924 only a few countries were represented by a dozen or more athletes. Today, about 3,000 athletes from nearly 100 countries compete in the Winter Olympic Games. These athletes compete in more than 100 events. The games showcase the strength, skills, stamina, and endurance of amazing individual athletes from around the world.

Grab your skis, ice skates, and snowboard and learn how the Winter Olympic Games became a worldwide phenomenal event watched by millions. Although fans the world over have been fascinated by the modern Summer Olympics since 1896, the Winter Olympics didn't officially begin until 1924. The event celebrates cold-weather sports, displaying the talents of skiers, ice skaters, hockey players, and, most recently, snowboarding. Like its summer counterpart, the Winter Games are dedicated to bringing together the world's top athletes to honor their talents and see who gets to stand on the medal podium. Gail Herman covers it all in a wonderful read--the highs, such as the 1980 US hockey team's unexpected gold medal grab, as well as the lows, including the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan figure-skating scandal in 1994. Includes 80 black-and-white illustrations and a 16-page photo insert.