How To Watch The Olympics

Description

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 the 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 Kasakhstan. 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.

Promotion info

The 2016 Rio games are finally here! This is the one book on the Olympics you really do need

Reviews

[You] will not find a better vade mecum than How to Watch the Olympics, David Goldblatt and Johnny Acton's crisply informative guide Observer Sports Books of the Year The perfect event-by-event primer for sport's biggest occasion Independent A handy and witty guide to the finer points of competition Independent on Sunday Sports Books of the Year A tour de force of brilliant writing, historical colour and sporting vignette Observer