{"product_id":"africa-and-the-olympics-winning-away-from-the-podium-9780896803527","title":"Africa and the Olympics: Winning Away from the Podium","description":"\u003cp\u003eAt the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games (held in 2021 due to COVID-19), the fifty-four African countries that participated finished the tournament with the lowest medal haul for any continent, continuing a historic trend since the inception of the modern Games in 1896. Reflecting this relative lack of sporting success, African Olympians--aside from elite Kenyan distance runners--rarely register in the minds of even the most dedicated followers of the Games. Yet for all their seeming invisibility on the Olympic landscape, African states, athletes, and officials have long been \"winning\" at the Olympics, albeit often far removed from the medal podium. \u003ci\u003eAfrica and the Olympics\u003c\/i\u003e shows how African actors have achieved these nonsporting victories and examines how they have used the Olympics to engage in transformative political activity, realize social mobility, and enhance the quality of life for individuals, communities, and entire nations. In tracing these historical and contemporary processes and the motivations that underlie them, the book complicates reductive notions of the Olympics as solely a sporting competition and instead considers Africa's engagement with the Games as a series of opportunities to improve personal, communal, ethnic, national, and even continental plights. If few sports fans have thought extensively about Africa and the Olympics, scholars have been only slightly more engaged with the subject. Most of this scholarship focuses on the International Olympic Committee's ban of apartheid South Africa from 1964 to 1988. Other works that consider the Olympics more broadly tend to deal with Africa only summarily, further reducing its already low profile. As a result, the academic literature resembles a patchwork of circumscribed studies dispersed in a range of fields and disciplines. Not since the publication of \u003ci\u003eAfrica at the Olympics\u003c\/i\u003e almost fifty years ago has a single volume featured a comprehensive history of the continent and the Games. This book both updates and expands previous work and, most importantly, reframes the analytical engagement with this topic.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTodd Cleveland\u003c\/b\u003e is a distinguished professor of history at the University of Arkansas. His books include these Ohio University Press titles: \u003ci\u003eSports in Africa, Past and Present\u003c\/i\u003e (2020), \u003ci\u003eFollowing the Ball: The Migration of African Soccer Players across the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1949-1975\u003c\/i\u003e (2017), \u003ci\u003eDiamonds in the Rough: Corporate Paternalism and African Professionalism on the Mines of Colonial Angola, 1917-1975\u003c\/i\u003e (2015), and \u003ci\u003eStones of Contention: A History of Africa's Diamonds\u003c\/i\u003e (2014).\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Ohio University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50916193534226,"sku":"9780896803527","price":38.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_d6ab24e5-d292-45e6-b29f-2718ff46b979.jpg?v=1738843398","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/africa-and-the-olympics-winning-away-from-the-podium-9780896803527","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}