Showing titles in History of Sports

WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD SHORTLISTED 2025 THE CRICKET SOCIETY/MCC BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD SHORTLISTED 2026 'Wonderfully wide-focused, unfailingly readable and laced with passages of insightful analysis, Tim Wigmore's history of test cricket is a true tour de force.' David...

The official autobiography of Wasim Akram, the 'Sultan of Swing', one of the greatest fast bowlers in the history of cricket. For twenty years, Wasim Akram let his cricket do the talking - with his electrifying left-arm pace, his explosive striking as a batsman, and his inspirational leadership...

This book is about the batters who see what mortals don’t. Javed Miandad purposefully makes errors to manipulate the field, Sachin Tendulkar dug up a pitch to take on Warne, Shivnarine Chanderpaul practised non-stop on a beach with tennis balls until he mastered technique and Joe Root’s great play against spin is known to be a confluence of three random events. Others, such as Smith, Pietersen and Richards, carried on the work of a man 100 years before their time, and Ranji changed cricket with a bucket.

This is the story of Barbara and Larry Savage's sometimes dangerous, often zany, but ultimately rewarding 23,000-mile global bicycle odyssey, which took them through 25 countries in two years. Miles from Nowhere is an adventure not to be missed! Along the way, these near-neophyte cyclists encountered warmhearted strangers eager to share food and shelter, bicycle-hating drivers who shoved them off the road, various wild animals, rock-throwing Egyptians, overprotective Thai policeman, motherly New Zealanders, meteorological disasters, bodily indignities, and great personal joys.

What will it take to run a marathon in less than two hours? The world's fastest times for the marathon have been dropping since the distance of 26.2 miles was made official nearly one hundred years ago. But after a noticeable decline that occurred for a half century, the times, while still edging lower, have stalled several minutes north of two hours for the past decade. For the first time, 1:59 examines what it will take for an elite distance runner to go subtwo hours.

Cast aside by his family at an early age, abandoned and left to fend for himself in the woods of Washington State, young Joe Rantz turns to rowing as a way of escaping his past. What follows is an extraordinary journey, as Joe and eight other working-class boys exchange the sweat and dust of life in 1930s America for the promise of glory at the heart of Hitler's Berlin. Stroke by stroke, a remarkable young man strives to regain his shattered self-regard, to dare again to trust in others–and to find his way back home.

The iconic captain Brendon McCullum, England's T20 visionaries Eoin Morgan and Jos Buttler and Trinidad's Kieron Pollard and Sunil Narine, who rose to become among the first T20 millionaires, explain how they shaped T20 - and how it shaped them. Test greats Rahul Dravid and Ricky Ponting recount what a sea-change T20 represented and decode T20 strategy. AB de Villiers explores the limits of modern batting. Venky Mysore, the cricket revolutionary you have never heard of, reveals how the game is changing off the field.

1972. The Munich Olympics. Palestinian members of the Black September group murder 11 Israeli athletes. Nine hundred million people watch the crisis unfold on television, witnessing a tragedy that inaugurates the modern age of terror.

In 1887 a linen salesman from New York City visited the Old Course at St. Andrews, Scotland, considered to be the oldest golf course in the world. While there, he visited the shop of golf legend Old Tom Morris. Soon after his return home, this purchase triggered a golf explosion that would soon...

A New York Times Bestseller * An Amazon Best Book of the Year * A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice * A Time Best Book for Summer Between the world wars, no sport was more popular, or more dangerous, than airplane racing. While male pilots were lauded as heroes, the few women who...

In the tradition of Seabiscuit, critically acclaimed author Neal Bascomb reaches back to the golden age of sport and crafts an utterly captivating narrative of what may be the most remarkable athletic feat of all time.

Real Madrid is the most successful sports team on the planet. The soccer club has more trophies than any other sports team, including 11 UEFA Champions League trophies. However, the story behind the triumph goes beyond the players and coaches. Generally unnoticed, a management team consisting mostly of outsiders took the team from near bankruptcy to the most valuable sports organization in the world. How did Real Madrid achieve such extraordinary success? Columbia Business School adjunct professor Steven G. Mandis investigates.

'Chess is a staggering invention, if indeed it was invented. Maybe it just evolved. It is still evolving, now faster than ever, and Peter Doggers has traced and tracked its never-ending development with wit, vigour and insight. Nothing artificial about his intelligence' - Sir Tim Rice Despite...

Ravi Shastri's prophetic words came true as India pulled off one of the greatest coups in cricketing history, beating Australia in Australia for the second time in three years, eventually breaching the Gabba fortress with what was eventually a skeleton team. Bharat was known as the 'Eyes and...

The 1989 Ironman World Championship was the greatest race ever in endurance sports. In a spectacular duel that became known as the Iron War, the world's two strongest athletes raced side by side at world-record pace for a grueling 139 miles. Driven by one of the fiercest rivalries in triathlon, Dave Scott and Mark Allen raced shoulder to shoulder through Ironman’s 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike race, and 26.2-mile marathon. After 8 punishing hours, both men would demolish the previous record - and cross the finish line a mere 58 seconds apart.

The World Cup is the largest sports event outside the summer Olympics: the progress of the 32 countries which qualify for the finals is watched by billions all over the globe. Since the very first World Cup in Uruguay in 1930, there have been 18 finals, held every four years (with a 12-year break over the World War II period). The World Cup in South Africa will be the 19th. Brian Glanville, the distinguished journalist and World Cup historian, has written a fascinating history of the event.

Completely revised and updated featuring two brand new chapters, in preparation for the 2019 Ashes series From the William Hill Award-Winning Author of A Lot of Hard Yakka comes Cricket's Greatest Rivalry: A History of the Ashes in 12 Matches by Simon Hughes. A fast-paced, distinctive history of...

A little over 100 years ago, East Africa was terra incognita to most whites: a land largely unmapped, sparsely settled by Europeans, and teeming with wildlife. It was the hunter-adventurer's paradise, and by the early 20th century, a small, lionhearted clan of explorers and big-game hunters began leading safaris there for money.

The Olympic Games have become the single greatest festival of a universal and cosmopolitan humanity. Seventeen days of sporting competition watched and followed on every continent and in every country on the planet. Simply, the greatest show on earth. Yet when the modern games were inaugurated...

In this extraordinary tour de force, David Goldblatt tells the full story of soccer's rise from chaotic folk ritual to the world's most popular sport - now poised to fully establish itself in the USA. Already celebrated internationally, The Ball Is Round illuminates soccer's role in the political and social histories of modern societies, but never loses sight of the beauty, joy, and excitement of the game itself.