ABSTRACT
The Olympic Games go far beyond just being a sporting mega-event. As themajor occasion for the assembly of nations and cultures, extending beyond the family of members of the United Nations and unlike any other event, the Olympics harness a humanistic and universal setting for celebrating global togetherness, staging cultural diversity and performing (his)stories of national identity and provenance. Commensurate with the motto ‘higher, faster, stronger’, the Olympic Games have conjured up powerful imageries of modernisation, mobility and progress. At the same time, they have also functioned as arenas of conflict, where contested ideologies of nation, race and gender have been repeatedly fought over. And, more than ever, the Olympics have come to signify a significant global, commercial opportunity (Tomlinson, 2005).
