The Olympics have a checkered, sometimes scandalous, political history. Jules Boykoff, a former US Olympic team member, takes readers from the event's nineteenth-century origins, through the Games' flirtation with Fascism, and into the contemporary era of corporate control. Along the way he recounts vibrant alt-Olympic movements, such as the Workers' Games and Women's Games of the 1920s and 1930s as well as athlete-activists and political movements that stood up to challenge the Olympic machine.

Jules Boykoff is an academic, author, and former professional soccer player. He is the author of Activism and the Olympics, Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games, Landscapes of Dissent, Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States, among others. He has been called "one of the biggest names in international Olympic Games academia." His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he has been interviewed on the BBC and Democracy Now! He is a professor of Politics and Government at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.