Olympics

Every four years we root for athletes previously unknown to us in sports we probably don’t follow closely in the intervening years.

A July 24 op-ed piece in Newsday, “Medaling in mud fights, tug-of-war and other games from Olympic history” by Bill Mallon surprised me in its list of minor sports which at one time or other brought athletes from around the world to compete – cricket, croquet, lacrosse, polo. You can access this article through our subscription to Newsday(http://search.proquest.com/publication/46489) . We also have a number of books on the history of the Olympics, both ancient and modern. These range from a study of the Beijing games , The Beijing Olympiad : the political economy of a sporting mega-event / by Paul Close to a reference work by the author of the Newsday piece , Historical dictionary of the Olympic movement / to The naked Olympics : the true story of the ancient games / by Tony Perrottet. You can find and borrow or consult these and other books on the Olympics by searching the term “Olympics” as a subject in SBUFind http://library.stonybrook.edu/.