What to Read if You're Missing the Olympics

Now that the Paris 2024 Olympics have come to a close, you might be missing your daily sports fix and perhaps thinking about sporting icons and legends of recent years, and throughout history.

It can seem glamorous, watching them compete on our screens. It’s easy to forget the hours upon of hours of blood, sweat and tears that goes into becoming an Olympic or professional athlete. Not to mention the personal toils and troubles that plague them. Those don’t disappear simply because they are on the telly! The stresses of everyday life continue, and sometimes magnify.

Reading their stories shines a great insight into their journey. From humble beginnings, through their training and career, and how success doesn’t always mean their problems disappear.

Here are some great reading options, if you’re eager to read about what it takes to become a star athlete.

Both of these titles are painfully honest memoirs, detailing the realities of success at the highest level. Both careers started young and took many turns before ending on a high note.

Open is sure to grip all who read it, even those who have no interest in tennis. From his time at tennis camps, which felt more like a prison camp, to becoming a media target with a shocking win in Wimbledon 1992. It will make you appreciate Agassi more as a human than as a tennis player.

Unbreakable is an unflinching look of one of the world’s greatest snooker players. How he was catapulted into a life of addiction and excess. It also shows how looks can be deceiving. When he was at the top of his career, he was at his worst mentally. But he built himself up and became unbreakable.

Two Brothers is a great piece of writing that documents post-war Britain very well, and covers the evolution of football in England and the Munich Air Disaster. We forget that political and economic hardships can affect sports, and Two Brothers takes us through these hardships as both a personal and professional life grow.

Liam Brady’s ‘Born to be a Footballer’ is also a great football and social history book as it covers attitudes to Football in Ireland, being Irish in London in the 70s and how that can negatively impact a career. But Liam didn’t let anything stop him, and he went on the become one of the Republic of Ireland's best-ever footballers.

 Sadly, not everyone has what it takes to be an Olympian. Even though you try, and you might be the best in your country, others are just too far ahead of you.

In Conor Niland’s ‘Racket’ he talks about what is like to be the one of the 99% of sports players. The good, but not the history makers. To have played with Serena Williams, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, with poor results. The Racket is a witty and revealing underdog's memoir and a unique look inside a fascinating hidden world.

What is it like to be a girl, or a woman, in a male-dominated sporting world? If you play on the boys' team, more people pay attention - but you get treated like an alien. When you switch to playing with girls and women, you have to live with a smaller audience, diminished status, and - for professional athletes - lower pay.

Grass Ceiling digs deep into the confluence between gender and sport, and all the questions it throws up about identity, status, competition and self-expression. At a time when women's sport is on the rise but still a long way from equality, it is a sharp, nuanced and heartfelt exploration of questions that affect every girl - and boy - who sets out to participate in sport.

And we cannot talk about sports books without mentioning what will certainly be the biggest sports book of the year.

Johnny Sexton will go down in history as Ireland’s greatest rugby player. In his hotly anticipated autobiography, Johnny will tell the story of his life, and explore the sources of his unmatched will to win. 

Everyone who cares about rugby, Irish sport and anything related will be reading this book. You do not want to miss out on what will, without a doubt, be the must-read book of the year.