Winter Olympics
From Chamonix to Salt Lake City

Edited by Larry Gerlach

295 pp., 6 x 9
25 photographs
Cloth $32.50
ISBN 978-0-87480-778-3
History / Sports History

Prior to the 2002 Winter Olympic Games held in Salt Lake City, Utah, ten highly regarded Olympic historians presented a series of lectures on the politics, history, and controversies surrounding the winter games. Those lectures are collected in The Winter Olympics offering readers fascinating insights into issues of gender, amateurism, commercialism, ceremony, and more over the one hundred years of Winter Olympics history. It also includes a survey of the Salt Lake Winter Games.

The only volume available that explores the winter games as a whole, The Winter Olympics is invaluable reading for understanding the movements’ roots as well as the contemporary issues surrounding the Games.

“A significant contribution to the historiography of the Olympic Games.”
—Alfred Senn, University of Wisconsin

"Provides the novice Olympic scholar with a superb progression through many of the historical and contemporary issues currently confronting the modern Olympic movement.
-Scott Martyn, University of Windsor

Larry Gerlach is professor of history at the University of Utah. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Contents and Contributors:

The Roots of Our Olympic Games, David C. Young, University of Florida

The Cool Games: Winter Olympics, 1924-2002, Roland Renson, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Gendering the Winter Olympic Games, Kari Fasting, The Norwegian University of Sport and Physical Education, Norway

Miracles, Modernization, Debt, and Even Disney on Ice and Snow: The North American Contribution to the Olympic Cultural Topography, Kevin B. Wamsley, University of Western Ontario, Canada

When Amateurism Mattered: Class, Moral Entrepreneurship and the Winter Olympics, Richard Gruneau, Simon Fraser University, Canada

Television, Corporate Sponsorship, and the Winter Olympics, Stephen R. Wenn, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada

Visions and Versions of American Culture at the Winter Games, Mark Dyreson, Pennsylvania State University

Toward a Cosmopolitics of the Winter Games, Jeffrey O. Seagrave, Skidmore College, New York

Flame and Fanfare: Victory Award Ceremonies and the Olympic Torch Relay, Robert K. Barney, University of Western Ontario, Canada

The Winter Paralympics: Past, Present, and Future, Gudrun Doll-Tepper, Humboldt Universitat, Germany

Salt Lake 2002, XIXth Olympic Winter Games, Alexander J. Hemphill, Salt Lake City