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In addition to its appeal across age and gender, the guide is designed for longevity. The spaces allocated for writing in Gold Medal winners includes London 2012 as well. It is not as if the rules are going to change, and the author clearly has future readers in mind in addition to those who have marked their copies with the winners in Beijing .
Verner Bickley has set out to explain each Olympic sport in alphabetical order, not quite an a-z, rather an a-w, starting with aquatics and finishing with wrestling. These and the twenty-six other sports make up the twenty-ninth Summer Games. The procedure is the same for each of them. Starting with a description of the sport and highlights from its history, it moves onto useful terms, the rules, gold medal winners (or more than one where the list would otherwise be unwieldy) and finishes off with a Quiz.
Thus it could be used in the classroom, its bite-sized summaries enabling a sport to be covered from top-to-bottom in a single class, or in a social setting where elements of “did you know?” and competitiveness are part of the group synergy. Who was Zeus? When were the first modern Olympic games held in Athens ? Is it any wonder that Trivial Pursuits has been so universally popular? Yes, we do want to know the answers because they have a topical edge and some take us back to our earliest days of learning.
Dr. Bickley provides much new learning too. It has generally been accepted that Baron Pierre de Coubertin reintroduced the games, which had started in 776 BC and stopped in 393 AD before he apparently reintroduced them in 1896. Until relatively recently he was given full credit by many, including himself, for doing so. In fact he was not solely responsible, but his contribution is undoubted. A Frenchman, he felt that the best way to achieve cooperation among the world's nations would be through peaceful international athletic contests, bringing the youth of the world together in healthy physical activities, irrespective of differences in race, culture or politics. What of the five coloured rings? They represent the five continents and the flag, first flown in 1920, is called the “festoon.”
Illustrations are not a key part of the guide, as they will surely be in others. There are only a few pages of photographs, but the first is a stunner. Runner J.M. Park is shown holding the torch on its detour to Hong Kong en route to Tokyo in 1964. Vapour rises from the water in the cool evening, with runner and torch strikingly silhouetted at the front of the boat. Elsewhere the photos are functional, except for the one other full plate, showing ‘queen of the wind' Shan Lee Lai skimming across the Athens waters. Again, Hong Kong hearts will beat faster at the memory.
Pictograms are included for every sport, the kind of motif that would serve well on a new stamp issue, explicit yet minimal and with plenty of vigour.
Whether readers will use the language notes for visitors and hosts remains to be seen. Chinese characters would have helped enormously. The joy of pointing to a short string of characters and being taken promptly to a bus stop or rest room has been the salvation of many a traveller, and would have served well here, despite an introduction stating that visitors may need to use English to communicate their wishes and thoughts.
The book has been written and published in Hong Kong, and 1988 is taken as the starting point for a detailed account of important aspects of the games (the year they returned to Asia after a 24-year absence), so one looks for local references more than one would do so in, say the European publications that have come out this year. There is a message from Timothy Fok, President of the Sports Federation & Olympic Committee of Hong Kong, and a preface by the evergreen Hon. Dr. Arnaldo de Oliveira Sales, who has been active in the local sports community for 60 years.
So it is surprising that Hong Kong's first participation, in the Helsinki 1952 games, goes unmentioned along with its first female athletes, two swimmers under the charge of the honourable gentleman who has written the preface. Should there have been more on China , given its role as host in August? A single athlete went to the Los Angeles games in 1932 and the first delegation went to the next, in Berlin . Nothing was won there but it was a pioneering adventure for the motherland, achieved on a tiny donation from the government.
The last three units of language, on Olympic abbreviations and expressions, are useful and bring to a close this well-timed book published by Proverse Hong Kong, which has strong regional and international connections, enabling worldwide distribution.
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