Winter Sports In The West

2024 marks the 100-year anniversary of the winter sports week festival celebrated in Chamonix in 1924, which is now recognized as the first Olympic Winter Games. As a globally watched quadrennial mega-event, the Winter Olympics is unique from both summer sport festivals and other winter festivals, such as the Winter X Games. This book explores the impacts, issues, and legacies of the past century of the Olympic Winter Games. Grounded in sport history, the chapters in this volume draw on the disciplines of cultural history, diplomatic history, global history, environmental history, and media history to analyze the continued allure of the Winter Olympics, a century after its origin, and in light of the sustained and significant problems facing the Olympic movement. Host cities’ efforts to create positive and lasting legacies are analyzed to highlight the challenges and complexities that have plagued the Olympic movement throughout the last century. The Olympic Winter Games at 100 is essential reading for any researcher, advanced student or scholar with an interest in Olympic Studies, sports development, sport policy and history. The chapters in this book were published as two special issues in The International Journal of the History of Sport.

Winter has shaped Canada's image and has been embraced with hearty enthusiasm from snowshoeing hikers in the nineteenth century, to future hockey stars on backyard rinks, to the indoor spectacle of figure-skating carnivals and curling bonspiels. Much of our literature, our songs, and our memories of youth reflect the bracing tonic that winter brings even as we curse the ice-laden roads on morning commutes or during weekend ski trips. But alas, winter's demise to a weak reminder of its former glory is a real possibility as climate change wreaks long-term havoc. This timely book takes a fond look at winter's past, its place in Canada's story, and how it has shaped our sports history. It also explores what climate change means for our sense of Canadian identity, for our winter sports heritage and its related industries, and for our ability to hold winter sporting events beyond the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Aboriginal Peoples and Sport in Canada uses sport as a lens through which to examine issues such as individual and community health, gender and race relations, culture and colonialism, and self-determination and agency. In this groundbreaking volume, leading scholars offer a multidisciplinary perspective on how unequal power relations influence the ability of Aboriginal people in Canada to implement their own visions for sport. The diverse analyses illuminate how Aboriginal people employ sport as a venue through which to assert their cultural identities and find a positive space for themselves and upcoming generations in contemporary Canadian society.