How To Watch The Olympics

Discover the culture, scores, winners, losers and the rules of every Olympic sport in time for the Rio de Janeiro 2016 The Olympic Games can dazzle us with the sheer scale and variety of its sporting contests. Yet many of the games are unfamiliar to even the most avid sports fan. Which is where this witty, insightful book comes in. How to Watch the Olympics offers each sport's backstory and culture, and explains the finer points of strategy, skulduggery and skill. Once you've read this book, you'll be on tenterhooks to see whether the Danes triumph at handball, what the Italian fencers are up to and why Greco-Roman wrestling is so crucial to Kazakhstan. You'll know who invented the butterfly stroke, where water polo serves as the closest expression of warfare and how shuttlecocks travel faster than tennis balls. This edition has been freshly updated for the 2016 Games in Rio, including fresh material from London 2012 and chapters on the new Olympic sports of rugby sevens and golf. Seventeen days, 10,500 athletes, 28 sports, 302 gold medals up for grabs: the Rio 2016 Olympic Games will soon be upon us. How to Watch the Olympics is your invaluable personal trainer. The 2012 edition was Independent, Independent on Sunday and Observer Sports Book of the Year

The must-have guide to the Summer Olympic Games This summer, millions of Americans will tune into the Olympic Games, the largest and most popular sporting event in the world. Yet while it's easy to be fascinated by agile gymnasts, poised equestrians, and perfectly synchronized swimmers, few of us know the real width of a balance beam, the intricate regulations of dressage, or the origin of those crowd-pleasing legs-in-the-air swimming formations. Luckily, David Goldblatt and Johnny Acton have created this utterly thorough and always fun guide to the rules, strategy, and history of each sport. Originally timed to 2012 London Games, their book is every bit as useful for Rio de Janeiro in 2016. With witty, detailed descriptions and clever illustrations, How to Watch the Olympics will help anyone grasp handball, archery, wrestling, fencing, and every other Olympic event like a true pro.

The Olympics is the world's biggest sporting event - and it moves centre stage for London 2012. Yet the games the world is familiar with - football, cricket, rugby, baseball, motor sports - are either missing or have a token presence. In their place are games that most of us have not a clue how to play or to watch. Which is where this witty, insightful book comes into play, offering the back story behind each Olympic sport and, by means of fiendishly clever diagrams and prose, explaining the rules and finer points. Once you have read David Goldblatt and Johnny Acton's accounts, you'll be on tenterhooks to see whether the Danish or the Koreans triumph at handball, just what the Italian fencers are up to, and if Greco-Roman wrestling really is like a game of chess.

This is the first academic text to explore TV sports media's output from this 'behind the scenes' perspective including the first scholarly interviews with the influential US broadcasters and producers and sports media professionals.

As the Olympic spectacle grows, broadcast coverage becomes bigger, more complex, and more sophisticated. Part sporting event, part reality show, and part global festival, the Olympics can be seen as both intensely nationalistic and a celebration of a shared sense of international community. This book sheds new light on how the Olympic experience has been shaped by television and expanded across multiple platforms and formats. Combining a multitude of approaches ranging from interviews to content analyses to audience surveys, the book explores the production, influence, and significance of Olympic media in contemporary society. Built on a central case study of NBC’s coverage of the Rio Games in 2016, which is then placed within 20 years of content analyses, the book focuses on the entire Olympic television process from production to content to effects. Touching on key themes such as race, gender, history, consumerism, identity, nationalism, and storytelling, Olympic Television: Broadcasting the Biggest Show on Earth is fascinating reading for any student or scholar with an interest in sport, media, and the global impact of mega-events.