The Gold in the Rings

A fascinating look at the modern Olympic games and how they have become such a commercial powerhouse with huge sponsorships

The original concept of the modern Olympic Games was, ideally, to showcase amateur athletes. That has now been replaced with the Games being viewed as a spectacle of commercialism, professionalism and glamour, especially for the hosting city. How this transformation took place and the people behind it is the subject of this book by two well-respected university professors.

As one might expect, this book is written in a style that is befitting a scholarly work with much detail and much research.  It is not one that can be picked up and enjoyed on a lazy afternoon.  The reader will have many different names, acronyms and situations come at him so quickly that it may be very confusing at first.  However, the subject matter is worth the time it takes to carefully absorb the information because it is very interesting.

The reader will learn about the presidents of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) from Avery Brundage, who valiantly fought to keep the "purity" of the Games alive and minimize, if not outright ban, any commercialism from creeping into the games.  His war of words and later legal action against a businessman in Los Angeles who used the 1932 games hosted by that city for promoting bread makes for one of the best stories in the book, even better than the biggest one for scandal, the bribery and other events in the saga of naming Salt Lake City as the host of the 2002 Winter Olympics. 

Of course, a book on the growing revenue and commercialism of the Olympics has to include the other time Los Angeles hosted the Games, 1984, and the wildly economically successful Games led by Peter Ueberroth.  While that is commonly considered to be a big turning point in the change of the Olympic spirit, it certainly is not the only factor in this swing, and the subsequent chapters up to the current games that will be held in Tokyo now in 2021 illustrate this change.  A reader will just have to make sure that he or she absorbs this slowly and carefully and at that point, it will be realized that the Olympics have gone a profound change in a relatively short amount of time.

I wish to thank University of Illinois Press for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.