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Sport and Democracy in the Ancient and Modern Worlds

being assisted in the St Louis Marathon of 1904 and then the Americans successfully protesting about similar aid given to Italian Pietri only four years later. He documents the open use of drugs in the early games, the disapprobation of the Eastern Bloc through rumoured government-sponsored drug use and Ben Johnson’s Zane-like adoption of drug abuse as a visual signifier. O’Mahony consolidates the notion of the potency of the image with his consideration of the classic photograph of Smith and Carlos in 1968, which provided immediate signifiers for protest. The last two chapters focus on official constructions chosen to convey the hosting National Olympic Committees’ vision, through which, in effect, the Olympics renews and reinvents itself every four years. ‘Promoting the Games’ examines the advent of the official poster in 1908 and its successors. These posters ‘have subsequently become one of the most powerful visual expressions associated with the Olympic movement’ and his critical discourse explores the plethora of meanings within them providing an intriguing sociopolitical history of the Games (p. 124). In ‘Designs on the Olympics: From Stadia to Sporting Paraphernalia’, O’Mahony surveys the role of stadia starting with the restoration of the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens which overtly identified Olympics’ classical Greek origins, origins usurped by the 1936 Berlin Olympiastadion which reinforced the desire of National Socialist Germany to be identified as the natural heir of the antique world. Stuart Hall in his introduction to Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practice states that ‘it is worth emphasizing that there is no single or “correct” answer to the question, “What does this image mean?”’ (London: Sage, 1997, p. 9). The analyses of visual images are interpretive, but O’Mahony’s readings offer an entertaining and convincing narrative demonstrating deeper meanings, not only embedded in the images but also generated by them. Overall, a valuable addition to the ‘visual turn’.