ABSTRACT
The Olympic Games offer a unique and ideal platform from which to represent nations and nationalities. As Hogan (2003) puts it, ‘the Olympic Games are key sites in the discursive construction of nation’. This is especially so for the host nation, giving it an opportunity to promote itself to potential tourists.1 This provides the strongest motivation for powerful elites within cities to bid for the right to host the Games which, therefore, brings with it an obligation to undertake a particular type of national storytelling, one which will show the nation in the best possible light.
