Ralph Craig, UM track, just after start of 100-meter race at 1912 Olympic Games

[Craig winning 2nd from right]

Carrol Haff, UM track, finish of 400-meter race at 1912 Olympic Games

[Haff, in lane 4, finished fifth, gold medal won by C.D. Reidpath of U.S.]

Ralph Rose at 1912 Olympic games in Stockholm

[copied from picture in official Olympic publication Den Femte Olympiaden (Olympic Games, Stockholm, 1912), Swedish Olympic Committee, page 170.

Ralph Rose, UM Track, trading card from 1908 Olympic games

[Trading Card published by National Licorice Company]

Henry Jamison "Jam" Handy, UM Swimming, trading card from 1904 Olympic games

[Trading Card published by Mecca Cigarette Company]

John Garrels, UM Track, at 1908 Olympic games in London, finished second in the 110 meter hurdles.

(Garrels is at far right.)

Gayle Dull, UM Track, posed with U.S. Three-Mile Team at 1908 London Olympic Games

[L-R: Eisle (Princeton), Dull (Michigan), Bonhag (Irish American Athletic Club), Cohn (Irish American A.C.) Trube (Cornell)

Olympic games, mega-events, and civil societies:globalisation, environment, resistance

This volume explores sports mega-events, their social, political, and cultural characters, the value systems that they inscribe and draw on, the claims they make on us and the claims the organisers make for them, the spatial and ethical relationships they create, and the responses of civil societies to them. Our premise is that sports mega-events are not simply sporting or cultural phenomena. They are also political and economic events, characterised by the generation and projection of symbolic meanings – most obviously over the nature of statehood, economic power, and of collective cultural identity – and by social conflict, especially over land use, and over the extent and contours of public spending commitments. Because of their peculiar spatial and temporal organization, they raise questions about the relationships between global cultural and economic flows and particular local and national spaces. Because of their evolutionary characteristics, they ask us to consider not simply the time of the event but of the effects of the event on the long-term direction, implementation, and consequences of public policy.