How to Watch the Olympics
Scores and laws, heroes and zeroes: an instant initiation into every sport
Published on 3. November 2011
Book
Hardback
400 pages
978-1-84668-475-3 (ISBN)
Description
The Olympics is the world's biggest sporting event - and it moves centre stage for London 2012. Yet the games the world is familiar with - football, cricket, rugby, baseball, motor sports - are either missing or have a token presence. In their place are games that most of us have not a clue how to play or to watch. Which is where this witty, insightful book comes into play, offering the back story behind each Olympic sport and, by means of fiendishly clever diagrams and prose, explaining the rules and finer points.
Once you have read David Goldblatt and Johnny Acton's accounts, you'll be on tenterhooks to see whether the Danish or the Koreans triumph at handball, just what the Italian fencers are up to, and if Greco-Roman wrestling really is like a game of chess.
Once you have read David Goldblatt and Johnny Acton's accounts, you'll be on tenterhooks to see whether the Danish or the Koreans triumph at handball, just what the Italian fencers are up to, and if Greco-Roman wrestling really is like a game of chess.
Reviews / Votes
the perfect event-by-event primer for sport's biggest occasion * Independent * those planning Olympic spectatorship in 2012 will not find a better vade mecum than How to Watch the Olympics, David Goldblatt and Johnny Acton's crisply informative guide to all 29 sports in next summer's games * Observer * a handy and witty guide to the finer points of competition * Independent on Sunday *More details
Edition
Main
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Product notice
Trade binding
Dimensions
Height: 204 mm
Width: 138 mm
Thickness: 36 mm
Weight
515 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84668-475-3 (9781846684753)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
New editions
David Goldblatt | Johnny Acton
How to Watch the Olympics
Scores and laws, heroes and zeroes: an instant initiation into every sport
Book
05/2012
Profile Books Ltd
€31.13
Article is exhausted; no reprint
Persons
David Goldblatt is the author of the World Football Yearbook and The Ball is Round: a Global History of Football ('A tour de force of brilliant writing, historical colour and sporting vignette' Observer). He writes the Sporting Life column in Prospect magazine, teaches the sociology of sport at the University of Bristol, and broadcasts regularly on the politics of sport for BBC Radio 4.
Johnny Acton is a writer who specialises in digging up obscure nuggets of information and making complex subjects accessible. He has written books on everything from pickling food (Preserved with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall) to the history of balloons (The Man Who Touched the Sky).
Johnny Acton is a writer who specialises in digging up obscure nuggets of information and making complex subjects accessible. He has written books on everything from pickling food (Preserved with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall) to the history of balloons (The Man Who Touched the Sky).