History

Any analysis of sport and sporting competitions must inevitably take into account the historical events which underpin them. For sports researchers, the British Library has an unrivalled collection of resources covering all aspects of the subject, in print and in other media, from books describing great sporting occasions to published biographies and autobiographies of amateur and elite athletes; coaching manuals; sport yearbooks and annual reports; directories; sports periodicals; and oral history interviews with Olympians and Paralympians. These materials cover a long period of sporting activity and sporting events both in Great Britain and elsewhere in the world. The legacy of the Games – invoked by commentators - can therefore also be interpreted in terms of what has been passed on to us over the centuries by the predecessors of the mega event; the early practitioners and organisers of different kinds of sport, and by those who codified the rules of these sports. On these pages we take a look at the history of sporting activity and the ways in which the past has fed into the phenomena of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Sports history in the British Library

The United Kingdom can proudly claim to be the original home of a number of the sports that we now associate with the Olympic Games, as well as having had a pioneering role in drawing up sporting rules and regulations. Using the British Library archive collections, we look at the antecedents of some of those sports and see how they have been described by contemporary observers.

Contemporary publications from the Berlin Olympiad of 1936

Susan Reed, the British Library’s lead curator for German studies, writes about two recently acquired titles which were published in Germany on the occasion of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. She discusses their political context, and provides a bibliography of relevant materials for further research into this controversial Games.