olympic games

Laurie Hernandez won big in gymnastics at the 2016 Olympics. Read about the hard work and training that helped make her an Olympic champion!.

At fifteen, Casey Legler is already one of the fastest swimmers in the world. She is also an alcoholic, isolated from her family, and incapable of forming lasting connections with those around her. Driven to compete at the highest levels, sent far away from home to train with the best coaches and teams, she finds herself increasingly alone and alienated, living a life of cheap hotels and chlorine-worn skin, anonymous sexual encounters and escalating drug use. Even at what should be a moment of triumph?competing at age sixteen in the 1996 Olympics?she is an outsider looking in, procuring drugs for Olympians she hardly knows, and losing her race after setting a new world record in the qualifying heats. After submitting to years of numbing training in France and the United States, Casey can see no way out of the sinister loneliness that has swelled and festered inside her. Yet wondrously, when it is almost too late, she discovers a small light within herself, and senses a point of calm within the whirlwind of her life. In searing, evocative, visceral prose, Casey gives language to loneliness in this startling story of survival, defiance, and of the embers that still burn when everything else in us goes dark.

Recounts Jesse Owens track and field exploits during the 1936 Olympic games, winning four gold medals and proving that people of all races can compete and win at these prestigious games.

Determined to understand why humans hate cane toads and to improve relations between the species, Limpy embarks on a dangerous trek from his swamp to the Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia.

After a fall during her balance beam routine thirteen-year-old Rachel and her cousin use the magical Sports Illustrated magazines in their grandfather's collection to travel back to the 1976 Olympics to observe Nadia Com?neci's perfect routines--and incidentally meet their grandfather who is covering the Olympics as a sports reporter.

Examines the impact of the gold medal winning performance of African American runner Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games on the Nazi views of Hitler's Germany.

Shares the life of Yusra Mardini, a Syrian refugee turned Olympic star.

A competitive swimmer in Syria, Yusra Mardini never let go of her Olympic dream, even when civil war made it too difficult to train in her country. In 2016, she was allowed to compete in the Rio Olympics as part of a special team for refugees. This was only months after making a daring crossing of the Mediterranean Sea in a sinking boat that she helped tow to shore. Dozens of lives were saved on the voyage. Still training, Mardini also acts as a spokesperson and educator for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees.

Looks at the American women who run the gold in the 31st Olympic Games.

Meet Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps! Phelps?s life story is examined from his childhood in Maryland where he began swimming at age eleven on his way to five world championships. Learn about Phelps?s Olympic career in the Sydney, Athens, Beijing, London, and Rio de Janeiro games throughout which he won 23 gold, 3 silver, and 2 bronze medals.