The Olympic Games have become the single greatest festival of a universal and cosmopolitan humanity. In The Games, David Goldblatt takes on a breathtakingly ambitious search for the answers and brilliantly unravels the complex strands of this history.
Illuminated with dazzling vignettes from over a century of Olympic competition, this stunningly researched history captures the excitement of sporting brilliance and the kaleidoscopic experience of the Games.

'The Olympics have never really been about sport. As David Goldblatt shows in this bracingly debunking history, from the outset the Games have been a way to project a view of the world, usually based on ugly politics and bogus science . . . Goldblatt writes about this with all his usual intelligence and social insight . . . he retains a superb eye for the telling detail, especially in little tales of personal failure to set alongside the more familiar stories of heroic success.'
Guardian
'Goldblatt has become arguably the premier Anglophone sports historian. Unflinching before millennia worth of material, he tells the Olympic story from the ancient Greeks to today's festival of sponsors. This book is illuminating, erudite, fair-minded, readable, told at a cracking pace, and puts the Games in their social and political context.'
Financial Times
'Elegant and ambitious.'
The Economist
'A high-speed toboggan ride through history'
New Statesman