Olympic and World Records Book

The Olympic Games is the biggest sporting event on the planet and has developed beyond all proportion since Frenchman Baron Pierre du Coubertin first mooted the notion of reviving the Ancient Olympic ideal in 1889. The first modern Olympics, held appropriately in Athens in 1896, featured a meagre 241 athletes from 14 countries; by the time the event hits London in 2012, 4,200 athletes from 147 countries will compete in front of a global television audience of 6.7 billion people. In the intervening 114 years, some of the greatest stories in world sport have been written, and names have been etched into sporting folklore. The Olympic Games and World Records Book is a collection of the finest achievements on sport's greatest platform and a celebration of the legends created by some of the most distinguished names in sporting history.