ABSTRACT
The Olympic Games attract significant investment, including from government expenditure. The soaring of the amounts committed and the additional costs incurred in carrying out the projects have led to increasingly frequent criticism of the Olympic event among the population of the host city. To reduce this bad press, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) asked the host cities to register the hosting of the event within the framework of a territorial development project whose impact would notably benefit the host region in a sustainable manner. In this context, we wish to enquire about the role played by the Olympic candidatures to develop the territory and in particular to promote a social action within which the sporting practice would take its rightful place. Our questioning deals with two complementary aspects: does the event actually trigger specific territorial projects? What real effects can we expect from it? To carry out this enquiry, we will adopt a quasi-experimental methodology comparing two comparable cities: London, which hosted the Olympic Games in 2012 and Paris, which was a candidate for that same Olympiad. In our analysis we will retain the information regarding both sports practice and the development operations planned around the Games. This work is based on the analysis of the projects submitted to the IOC, the achievements of the two cities, and the analysis of the press and municipal archives. The results reveal that the Olympic project does not necessarily bring about the effects we might imagine, but that even so, we cannot neglect its impact on the territory.
