In this Book
- The Sarajevo Olympics: A History of the 1984 Winter Games
- Book
- 2015
- Published by: University of Massachusetts Press
summary
To most observers, the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, were an unmitigated success. That year, the unlikeliest of candidate cities in the unlikeliest of candidate countries did what many had thought impossible: it hosted an international sports competition at the highest level, housing and feeding hundreds of athletes and thousands of tourists while broadcasting a positive image of socialist Yugoslavia to the world.
The first Winter Games held in a communist country, Sarajevo also marked the first Olympic confrontation of Soviet and American athletes since the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Games. And the competitions themselves were spectacular and memorable. This was the Olympics of British ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, American skiers “Wild Bill” Johnson and Debbie Armstrong, and East German skaters Katarina Witt and Karin Enke, not to mention a Soviet hockey team that rebounded from its stunning loss to the Americans at Lake Placid four years earlier to win all seven of its matches.
Yet The Sarajevo Olympics is more than just a history of sport. Jason Vuic also retraces the history of the Olympic movement, analyzes the inner workings of the International Olympic Committee during the troubled 1970s and 1980s, and places the 1984 Winter Games in the context of Cold War geopolitics. The book begins and ends by reminding readers that less than a decade after it hosted the Olympics, the Bosnian city of Sarajevo found itself at the vortex of a bloody and brutal civil war that would end with the dissolution of the multiethnic Yugoslavian state.
Table of Contents
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- Acknowledgments
- pp. xi-xii
- Guide to Pronunciation
- pp. xiii-xv
- Introduction. Remember Sarajevo
- pp. 1-10
- Part I. Background and Organization
- 1. Athens, 1978
- pp. 13-24
- 2. The Swedish Prince
- pp. 25-36
- 3. Nobody Changes Light Bulbs
- pp. 37-50
- 4. No Amount of Slivovitz
- pp. 51-64
- 5. Up Close and Personal
- pp. 65-76
- Part II. Citius, Altius, Fortius
- 6. Do you Believe in Debacles?
- pp. 79-94
- 7. Nine Times First Place
- pp. 95-111
- 8. The Nasenbohrer
- pp. 112-128
- 9. The “Minor Sports”
- pp. 129-149
- Epilogue. The Seats of Zetra Hall
- pp. 150-164
Additional Information
ISBN
9781613763667
Related ISBN(s)
9781625341648
MARC Record
OCLC
919384612
Pages
232
Launched on MUSE
2015-09-01
Language
English
Open Access
No