ABSTRACT
The staging of an Olympic Games may be likened to the equivalent of organizing twenty-six international sports events, ten royal weddings, three European Capital of Culture programmes, two World Expos and one World-Cup Final all at the same time and over a sixteen-day period. When the Paralympic Games are included, the work is almost doubled. Thus, the duration of the planning, the scale of the stakeholder community and the extent of reliance on public and private funds sets it apart as one of the largest undertakings that a nation may face in a peacetime setting. This makes discussions about the management and economics of the Games a vast subject with the potential to include anything from what is required to manage car parking at competition venues to attributing a country’s annual security budget as a cost of staging the Olympic Games. Yet, managing the Games is only one task of the Olympic move-
ment. Other areas of management include involvement with such organizations as the World Anti-Doping Agency, the United Nations, the National Olympic Committees and International Sports Federations, to name just a few.1 Numerous studies have been published on both the management and economics of the Olympics (Chappelet and Bayley 2005, Preuss 2006), so to focus our attention, we consider only aspects that have been central to the development of
the Olympic movement and which provide key insights into the complexity of its economic structure over the last thirty years. First, we explore aspects of managing the Olympics, distinguishing between two key parameters – the Olympic family and the Olympic Games. Subsequently, we consider where the money comes from and where it is invested. While in Chapter 8 we discuss approaches to assessing the economic impact of an Olympic Games, here we provide key information about the management and economic infrastructure that sustains the work of the Olympic movement, taking into account what happens both within the IOC and in the organizations which work with it to deliver Olympic activities.
