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Mark Dyreson, Making the American Team: Sport, Culture, and the Olympic Experience (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 1998)
MORE THAN ANY OTHER COUNTRY, the United States has played a pivotal role in determining the modern ideal and form of human athletic performance. Over the past 100 years, the Olympic Games have emerged as the principal forum for the celebration of this cultural competitiveness, an event that unabashedly announces what nation is best in sport. Governments have, by extension, positioned championships and Olympic titles into various ideological projects of political service or even as indices of cultural progress. Hundreds of books have qualitatively and quantitatively rationalized such invocations of US supremacy in the Games. Mark Dyreson's well-written, well-researched book is the first scholarly work to establish the historical origins of American cultural sentiment linking Olympic performance to national importance. While the more significant question may have been how the Americans came to define the parameters of Olympic sport, more broadly, Dyreson's study amply demonstrates how they convinced themselves that Olympic success equated to national strength.
Medal totals, contrived points schemes, and outright victories demonstrated that United States athletes were best at certain sports; indeed most sports. However, the positioning of sports as cultural signifiers in periodicals such as Outing, Collier's, Harper's, Scribner's and in dailies such as the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Brooklyn Times, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch provided specific readings of American performances, contributing to the creation of what Dyreson calls the "sporting republic." Unlike Alfred Senn's overview of Olympic politics, Allen Guttmann's examination of significant events, and John MacAloon's analysis of ritual, Dyreson's work is contextualized within an extensive backdrop of what he refers to as the "intellectual" periodicals and a selection of newspaper sports pages. In addition, Dyreson provides readings of many of the significant events of the early Olympics by American sport leaders...