Absent anything else meaningful to say, I thought I'd blog a review of a book I'm chewing my way through right now:

David Young, The Modern Olympics: a struggle for revival (1996)

If the figure-skating antics of Salt Lake City 2002 have still got you down, find a copy of this little gem and rekindle your Olympic fever all over again. David Young - a professor of ancient Greek by trade - has put together an extremely well-researched investigation into the origins of the modern games, particularly the emergence of parallel grass roots Olympic movements in England and Greece decades prior to 1896. By uniting contemporary Olympic scholarship with a reading knowledge of Modern Greek, Young is able to venture into sources never considered by Western scholars and then draw conclusions which turn a lot of conventional wisdom about the rebirth of the Olympic games on its head. The most cherished of the myths surrounding the modern Olympic movement is that it was the brainchild of one man alone, a Frenchman by the name of Pierre de Coubertin. Although it is clear that without Coubertin's efforts such a revival may have never taken place, Young demonstrates that he drew his inspiration from a host of predecessors who have remained mostly nameless and uncredited until only recently. Considering that the first Olympics of the modern era took place in Athens, and the next Summer games are to return to that city in 2004, The Modern Olympics is a great way to get into the spirit of things and remember why we gather every four years in the first place (and no, it's not because Coca-Cola wants us to).