ABSTRACT
On 18 January 2013, five months after the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games, the British Library received its copy of Helen Lenskyj’s book, Gender Politics and the Olympic Industry (Lenskyj, 2012). The Library’s Sport and Society group were quick to share this: “#Olympics may be over but we are still getting many sport-related books”, they Tweeted (@BLsportsociety). The fact that new books on the Olympics were still being published should not come as a surprise: indeed, the book you are holding right now, published in 2013, is part of this wider trend. The Olympics have long been a popular subject for academic and trade publishing, and that popularity has burgeoned since 2005, when London won the bid to host the 2012 Games. Over the last eight years, we have seen the Olympic and the Paralympics addressed by thousands of new pieces of writing in books for diverse audiences, journal articles and special editions of journals from a wide range of academic disciplines. The publishing industry is one of the sectors of British economy to have benefited from London 2012. As the British Library’s Tweet quoted here suggests, the legacy of that benefit is likely to be felt for years to come as authors write more about 2012, or use 2012 as a springboard for other Olympic and Paralympic writing. The motto of London 2012 was ‘inspire a generation’: for hundreds of authors, this was easily recast as ‘inspire a publication’.
