A Passion for Victory: The Story of the Olympics in Ancient and Early Modern Times (review)

This overview of the original Greek and revived modern games opens with a chronology and a prologue teaser about a 1924 Olympic athlete who survived the wreck of the Titanic. The text shifts then to chapters on the hundreds of years of ancient Olympic history, during which the games were variously viewed as celebration of human physical development or training for war, depending on one's philosophy and politics. Pretty well shuttered by the Christian Church in the fourth century in the interest of obliterating all pagan practices, the games lay dormant until a few eccentric English towns launched their own small competitions in the 1600s and 1700s, and then Pierre de Coubertin stirred enough European and American interest to refashion the games for a modern age in the nineteenth century. Though the occasional detail is slightly confusing, Bobrick's text sparkles when he covers the goofy organizational missteps of the earliest modern games and discusses the condescending prejudice of the "civilized" nations against their small-fry competitors. The controversies surrounding participation in the German Olympics of 1936 and the intrusion of two world wars into the traditional "Olympic Truce" are also sensitively discussed. Readers gearing up for the London games will want to take a look at this, along with Davida Kristy's Coubertin's Olympics and Susan Bachrach's Nazi Olympics (BCCB 3/00).