Product Information

The Complete Book of the Olympics

By: David Wallechinsky, Jaime Loucky
Retail Price: $49.95
Booktopia Price $42.50
ISBN: 9781845133306
Format: Paperback
Published: April 2008

All prices in Australian Dollars
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Contained with the pages of this encyclopaedic book is anything anyone could ever need or want to know about the modern Olympic Games. It provides a complete statistical record since the founding of the modern Games in 1896 - from medals won to times, distances or scores recorded by the top eight competitors in all events, whether they be Olympic staples such as the marathon or long-discontinued competitions such as Olympic croquet or the tug of war.

But this is much more than a dry compendium of names, numbers and scoring systems. It also contains a summary history of each event at each of the 26 modern Games enriched with an extraordinary wealth of Olympic lore and anecdote. David Wallechinsky and Jaime Loucky provide thought-provoking analysis of issues and controversies from shamateurism to drug-taking and corruption and they have sieved through more than a century of Olympic history to assemble a mind-boggling collection of stories that range from the inspiring, through the comic to the bizarre.

Here you can read about long-forgotten characters such as the boy who was plucked from the streets of Paris to act as cox for two Dutch oarsmen in the paired-oar event in 1900 and, after steering them to victory and a Gold Medal, returned to obscurity, his name unknown to this day, or the 72-year-old winner of a silver medal for target-shooting.

In short, this is the essential companion to the greatest sporting festival in the world.

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