ABSTRACT
Modern Olympic Games have always attracted significant public attention, but the
level of social, political and economic mobilization generated by the 2012 London Olympics, even before the games in Beijing in 2008 had taken place, has been truly
unprecedented. There are a number of reasons for this, and two of those will be the subject of the present study. First, in 2002, the International Olympic Committee
(IOC) began framing the concept of ‘legacy’, which, together with the concept of ‘sustainable sports development’, has become an essential part of the IOC and the
Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (OCOG) vocabulary. As a result, the IOC, among other things, amended the Olympic Charter to include a particular
reference to the creation of positive legacies from the games and the promotion of sports for all in the host country. [1] In addition, the IOC developed the Olympic
Games Impact (OGI) project, which requires host cities to undertake a comprehensive longitudinal study designed to measure the economic, social and
environmental impact of the games. [2] Second, a central plank of the London 2012 bid was that the games will be used to promote sports participation across the country and for all groups. Both the bid committee and the UK government, as a
major stakeholder in this project, promised to use the games to inspire the country’s people to become more physically active. [3-4] This is the most ambitious project in
the history of the Olympic Games in terms of both its scope and level of change, as, in order to be implemented successfully, it has to address not only people’s behaviour
but also deeply rooted social structures and relations. The conceptual, political, economic and logistical challenges which this undertaking presents are enormous and
have already created a number of tensions. This paper addresses the little explored issue of the link between hosting the
Olympic Games and sports participation in the host country. In particular, it takes a process-oriented approach to the Olympic legacy that suggests that legacies are constructed and not given. Most studies so far have concentrated on measuring
legacy effects after the games had finished and, with some limited exceptions [5], there has been a dearth of information on the actual processes involved in
envisioning, framing and implementing Olympic legacies. The paper has three interrelated sections. The first looks at the nature of the Olympic legacy enterprise
both as a conceptual issue and a set of institutional practices. The second examines the delivery of the sports participation vision (i.e., creating sustainable sports
development) by using two original case studies. One focuses on the English Volleyball Association (EVA), which oversees an Olympic sport, and the other involves a community initiative, StreetGames. Finally, the key processes involved in
constructing a sustainable Olympic sports development legacy are discussed.
