This special issue examines the realized and unrealized Olympic aspirations. The first paper examines problems and challenges in the Olympic Games in Beijing and afterwards. The second paper examines the Olympic challenges in Beijing. The third article explores the shift from international...

It has been contended that sports in the USA (as well as other areas in American life such as economics and politics) substantively differs from its post-industrial European counterparts. This has been broadly labelled as 'American exceptionalism'. With specific regard to sport, this has been...

The London 2012 bid was based on the promise to use the Olympic Games to promote sports participation for all groups across the UK. This is the most ambitious project in the history of the Olympic Games in terms of both its scope and level of change, as, in order to be implemented successfully, it ...

The 2004 Athens Olympic Games provided the host city with an excellent opportunity to present itself globally as a modern, well designed and well run metropolis with modern facilities and infrastructure symbolic of quality of life and economic investment. The way, however, that the huge, expensive...

This essay provides an overview of the efforts made by African Americans to compete with and against their white counterparts on an equal basis in highly organised sport in the USA. These efforts have resulted in a relatively large number of African Americans participating in football, basketball,...

This study is to analyse how the Japanese have traditionally received and currently perceive the Super Bowl, and for this purpose, it aims to locate the position of American football in Japanese history, society, and culture. It explores the game's history and then examine the degree of its spread...

The papers included in this collection feature stories of US-based Latino athletes playing at levels from amateur to professional, covering a time-span from colonial San Antonio to 1930s Chicago to present-day Texas. The papers demonstrate how Latinos have used sport in the USA to build community...

With the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks looming in the background, the US turned the 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City into a nationalistic pageant. One of the surprises of American celebrations of 'imagined community' at the Salt Lake games was that an old and venerable theme in American ...

This special issue focuses on the history of places (especially stadiums) that modern Americans have manufactured to play and watch sports. The 8 papers (in addition to a prologue and an epilogue) address, among others, the commercial and sociopolitical aspects of the building of such facilities....

When in 1931 the United States sent an all-white track and field team to compete against an all-white South African roster, it inaugurated a series of interchanges that over the next six decades illuminated intersections between politics, race, and sport in both nations. Between the 1930s and the...