March 9, 2004

Olympic speaker series celebrates 2004 Track and Field Trials

Sir Michael Llewellyn-Smith

California State University, Sacramento kicks off a series of special events tied to the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials at CSUS and the Summer Olympics in Athens with a lecture on Friday, March 26 by Sir Michael Llewellyn-Smith, the former British ambassador to France and Greece.

His talk will be on “The Olympic Games: The Greek Connection, 776 BC – 2004 AD” at 6:30 p.m. in the University Union Ballroom. It will be preceded by a reception at 5 p.m.

Llewellyn-Smith is the author of the new book Olympics in Athens 1896 and the forthcoming book Athens: A Cultural and Literary History. A renowned Hellenic scholar, he also wrote Ionian Vision, an account of the failed Greek military campaign in Asia Minor following World War I.

His appearance will be the first of four upcoming talks presented by the University’s Tsakopoulos Center for Hellenic Studies with support from the Hellenic Foundation.

On the day of Llewellyn-Smith’s talk, the Tsakopoulos Hellenic Collection on the University Library’s third floor will open an exhibit on the modern and ancient Olympics, which continues to Sept. 26. A separate display of artifacts and memorabilia from the modern Olympics will be on the library’s lower level.

The second speaker in the series will be Stephen Miller, professor of classics at UC Berkeley. His talk, “The Ancient Stadium at Nemea and the Modern Nemean Games: A Step into History,” will be at 7 p.m., Thursday, April 15 at the Tsakopoulos Hellenic Collection.

At 7 p.m., Friday, April 30 CSUS history professor Barbara Keys will talk about “The ‘Nazi Olympics’: Politics, Propaganda, and Protest at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games” at the Tsakopoulos Hellenic Collection. Keys is currently working on a book about international sports competitions in the 1930s.

The series concludes with Alexander Kitroeff, associate professor of history at the University of Haverford in Pennsylvania. He’ll give a talk on “Wrestling with the Baron: Greece, Coubertin and the Olympic Revival” at 7 p.m., Thursday, May 13 at the Tsakopoulos Hellenic Collection. Kitroeff’s most recent book is Wrestling With the Ancients: Modern Greek Identity and the Olympics.

Upcoming CSUS Showcase events will include numerous events centered at the University Library before and during the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials, on campus July 9-18. The events will range from sports-related speakers to an exhibit of Olympic art to the return of a popular multimedia display of unusual sporting events that was featured during the Trials at CSUS in 2000.

Details about the CSUS Showcase will be online at www.csus.edu/news as soon as they’re available. For more about the Hellenic Speaker Series, call (916) 278-7103.

Media assistance is available from CSUS public affairs at (916) 278-6156.

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