UT Gains Collection of Olympic History
A drug testing controversy from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics is one of the olympic topics contained in the Pound Collection at UT-Austin. The Collection will be made public in 2013. Image courtesy of the International Olympic Committee.Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
There is a lot of material in the Richard W. Pound Olympic Collection at the University of Texas at Austin – 400,000 pages, covering 50 years of history. But Dr. Steven Ungerleider promises it will be worth the effort to process and digitize all that material.
Ungerleider is a friend and colleague of Richard Pound. He’s also the co-chair of the Board of Advisors of the Texas Program in Sports and Media and a visiting scholar at UT Austin. He says it took a little arm-twisting to get Pound to agree to give UT the collection, which is more than just straight-up accounts of Olympic performances.
The material includes previously unreleased information about drug testing, site selection and other hot topics. And Ungerleider says some of what’s in the documents may shake up the Olympic world once it’s released. (To hear more about that, click on the player on this page to hear the full interview.)
We’ll have to wait and see if controversy follows the opening of the Pound Collection, which Ungerleider says won’t be for about a year.
To hear the interview, click the player above.
Podcast: Download (25.7MB)
