Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Theagenes of Thasos

(Encyclopedia)Theagenes of Thasos, fl. 5th cent. b.c., ancient Greek athlete. He excelled in boxing and the pankration, which combined wrestling and boxing, and won 10 victories at the Isthmian Games, nine at the N...

Szewińska, Irena

(Encyclopedia)Szewińska, Irena, 1946–2018, Polish sprinter and long jumper, b. Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, Russia) as Irena Kirszenstein, grad. Univ. of Warsaw, 1970. In her first Olympics (1964), she won sil...

Bolt, Usain St. Leo

(Encyclopedia)Bolt, Usain St. Leo, 1986–, Jamaican sprinter. Unusually tall (6 ft 5 in./1.96 m) for his sport, he won the gold medal for the 200-m sprint at the 2002 world junior championships and then broke the ...

Special Olympics

(Encyclopedia)Special Olympics: see Shriver, Eunice Mary Kennedy. ...

amateur

(Encyclopedia)amateur, in sports, one who engages in athletic competition without material recompense. Upper-class Englishmen in the 19th cent. used the concept to help define their social status, first applying th...

bobsledding

(Encyclopedia)bobsledding, winter sport in which a bobsled—a partially enclosed vehicle with steerable sledlike runners, accommodating two or four persons—hurtles down a course of iced, steeply banked, twisting...

games, theory of

(Encyclopedia)games, theory of, group of mathematical theories first developed by John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. A game consists of a set of rules governing a competitive situation in which from two to n i...

Lewis, Carl

(Encyclopedia)Lewis, Carl (Frederick Carlton Lewis), 1961–, American sprinter and jumper, b. Birmingham, Ala. A star in high school and at the Univ. of Houston, he became possibly the greatest track athlete of al...

Diagoras of Rhodes

(Encyclopedia)Diagoras of Rhodes, ancient Greek athlete, fl. 5th cent. b.c. A boxer and wrester, he won an Olympic championship in 464 b.c. and won numerous times at the Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean games. Pindar ...

Haile Gebrselassie

(Encyclopedia)Haile Gebrselassie, 1973–, Ethiopian track athlete. Adept at both indoor and outdoor distance events as well as long-distance cross-country and marathon running, Haile won major races in distances r...