This is Democracy – Episode 156: The Olympics

Jeremi, Zachary, and guests Drs. Robert Edelman and David McDonald discuss the upcoming Tokyo Olympics, and the politics attached to the international sports competition. Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "They say that sport unites the world". Robert Edelman is Professor of Russian History and the History of Sport at the University of California, San Diego. He has written four books including: Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR and Spartak Moscow: A History of the People’s Team. He has consulted on documentaries for HBO, PBS, ESPN and CBS. Together with Christopher Young from the University of Cambridge, he is co-editor of the University of California Press’s new series Sport in World History, and is co-editor with Wayne Wilson of the The Oxford Handbook of Sports History.  He is the co-director with Young of an international research project on the history of Cold War sport under the auspices of the Cold War International History Project.  The first of two conference volumes, entitled The Whole World Was Watching was recently published by Stanford University Press.   David McDonald is the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair in Russian History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of, among many titles: Divided Government and Russian Foreign Policy, 1900-1914 and “Sport History and the Historical Profession,” in R. Edelman et al., eds., The Oxford Handbook to Sport History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 61-78.