Athletic Teams and Olympic Dreams

Heroes or chokers, rich or poor, pro or amateur, there’s nothing simple about how we see athletes. “We even demand all of them to be role models, as though athleticism is itself imbued with some noble purpose,” says noted sports writer and veteran journalist Tom Hawthorn. Hawthorn is the 2014 Southam Lecturer for the Department of Writing and will discuss our love/hate relationship with athletes in a free public lecture at 7pm Wednesday, January 29, in UVic’s HSD A240.

Just in time for the Sochi Olympics, Hawthorn will also be looking at the history of the Olympic movement with an emphasis on protests, from the move to boycott the Nazi Olympics and the Black Power salutes of 1968, to the African boycott of the Montreal Olympics and the contemporary protests over Russia's odious anti-gay laws.