Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt
Categories
Politics & government

THE OTHER OLYMPIANS

Michael Waters

Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports

The story of the early trans athletes and Olympic bureaucrats who lit the flame for today's culture wars.

In December 1935, Zden?k Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women's sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes. In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany's atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC's nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender. Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking, hidden-in-the-archives marvel, an inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports.

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Book Published 2024-06-01 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Comments

Michael Waters's account of queer athletes caught up in the global drama of 'Hitler's Olympics,' and its overlapping fanaticisms of racial and gender purity, feels as remote as a folk tale and as familiar as today's Title IX battles. This is first-rate historyimpressively researched and captivatingly told.

"The Other Olympians is a stunning addition to queer and sports history, an inspiring and cinematic account of perseverance, identity, activism, and, ultimately, joy. Michael Waters has achieved what all great historians aim to do: changing our understanding of the present by illuminating the hidden stories of the past.

Michael Waters performs an Olympian act of storytelling, using the stories of these extraordinary athletes to explore in brilliant detail the struggle for understanding and equality.

Michael Waters's account of queer athletes caught up in the global drama of 'Hitler's Olympics,' and its overlapping fanaticisms of racial and gender purity, feels as remote as a folk tale and as familiar as today's Title IX battles. This is first-rate history impressively researched and captivatingly told.

Waters masterfully puts into focus the long-overlooked, yet remarkable stories of a cadre of Olympians who battled for their right to compete on the world's biggest stage as their true selves. A crucial read for anyone interested in the intersection of sports, identity, and social justice.