‘The Other Olympians’ explores the making of modern sports
‘The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports’By Michael Watersc.2024, Farrar, Straus and Giroux$30/368 pages He’s going to win.
It’s apparent: much as you’re trying, hard as you’re running, as much as your lungs burn, he’s ahead by two paces. You had a good start but he’s the better athlete.
You know this now. He’s going to win this competition and you’re going to lose. But, as in the new book “The Other Olympians” by Michael Waters, there may be another outcome.
Young Zdnek Koubek avoided sports as much as possible. Born nearly seven years before the creation of the Czechoslovakian state, he always understood that he was “different”: in school, he had a fierce reputation for fighting, but he couldn’t relate to rough-and-tumble male classmates or their games.
