Sport & Sporting Culture

The second best thing about surfing is talking about it afterward. Surf legend Gerry 'Mr Pipeline' Lopez's collection of surfing stories Surf is Where You Find It, now out in its third edition, relates some of the epic waves he's encountered, and the legendary individuals he met along the way in a lifetime's pursuit of the glide on the ocean and on the land. Here, he picks five books on surfing by friends and heroes who have found lessons in surfing about what it means to live life well.

What does it mean to live wild and young and free? We asked the authors of a photography book on surf van culture along the California coast—"a story of youth choosing to follow their dreams, living out of vans, existing for surf and travel and freedom, and always chasing the best waves"—for references that help answer this question. Wanderlust can be a philosophy for life, as these books illustrate beautifully.

The Olympics are one of the world's great celebrations of sport. Here Philip Barker, Olympic historian and sports journalist, chooses five books that help you to understand the games, their origins and their traditions—and to relive the sporting drama of past Olympic Games.

The Olympics are big business—but the extent to which they benefit their host cities is increasingly called into question. They've also long been enmired in political controversy. Here Helen J Lenskyj, the academic and anti-Olympics activist, discusses the malign influence of big business, and the inseparability of sport and politics, as she chooses her best books on the bad side of the Olympics.

What do you think about when you’re training at the gym, or on the tennis court? And what should you think about, if your goal is maximizing performance and results? Seasoned sports psychologist Bill Cole, coach for numerous Olympic teams and top-level international athletes, reveals that the number one road block to athletic performance often isn’t physical—it’s overthinking.

Sport is central to American culture but there are surprisingly few great novels devoted to it. Chad Harbach, author of the bestselling novel, The Art of Fielding, picks his favourite 'novels with sporting themes.'

The 11 times gold medal-winning Paralympian athlete Tanni Grey-Thompson, now a peer in Britain’s House of Lords, tells us about the spirit and legacy of the Olympics. She picks books on "the spirit of sport."

Table tennis champion and author of Bounce: How Champions are Made, Matthew Syed believes that winning is partly the placebo effect of confidence.

Debanjan Chakrabarti, head of the Intercultural Dialogue Programme of the British Council in India, says good sportsmanship is a 19th-century imperial construct. He walks us through five engaging books on sportsmanship and cheating.

The Professor of Comparative Politics & German Studies at the University of Michigan and avid baseball, basketball, American football and ice-hockey fan gives us his views on Global Sport.