ABSTRACT
Part of the Olympic industry is the knowledge-production that attaches to getting, staging and evaluating the event.1 When a city wins the right to stage the Games, consultants and specialists build careers on it; analysts offer advice, perspectives and models for monitoring the impact of the Games; pundits and commentators interpret trends and trajectories; and universities with subject-based claims to expertise, or through mere geographical serendipity, lay claim to particular skills of commentary and evaluation. In one English university, for instance, a pro-vice chancellor
f rts, niversit of Brighton, UK
for research could open aBritish Council symposiumwith the claim that barely any other university in the UK was as equipped as his to stage an event that would enable us to truly understand the importance and effects of an Olympic Games – he could parade his historians, sociologists, economists, exercise scientists, educationalists, political scientists, sport studies stars and lay claim to a critical mass of specialists whose interdisciplinary potential made them a unique team for illuminating the forthcoming event – London’s third hosting of the modern (Summer) Olympic Games. At the symposium were also people who would be doing the same thing in Brazilian cities four years on, as knowledge-brokers, consultants and academics played their own international game of baton-passing, or torch-carrying, from one high-profile Olympic city to another. And one word has come to bind all this multifarious activity together – legacy: we all want to know or create or learn a formula for understanding and so ensuring Olympic legacy. Not impact, not effects, not outcomes, but legacy. In this article I explore different – some widely recognised, some contested, some previously ignored – dimensions of legacy, and the legacy debate; but first, to the term itself within Olympic history and discourse.
