ABSTRACT
Before the start of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, the city of Vancouver temporarily sought to impose several by-laws restricting the scope of political messages permissible on signage in the civic space, to those complimentary of the Olympics. Similarly, the Provincial government temporarily augmented its own and the city’s administrative authority to delegitimize political expression at variance with the official positive Olympic discourse. The International Olympic Committee (IOC), for its part, employed discursive and contractual strategies to effect a similar predetermination of permissible expression in the context of the 2010 Olympics, formally expressed through its ‘clean venue’ guidelines and related contractual arrangements. The IOC made the contractually binding acceptance of such guidelines by relevant Canadian government authorities a prerequisite for Vancouver’s successful hosting bid. Such incidents exemplify the contestations over the forms of legitimate expression in the host city’s civic space during the Olympic Games. This paper examines the structure and the discursive effects of these contestations evident during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games. It argues that the overall effects of the IOC’s discursive and governmental legislative strategies acted as significant constraints for the emplacement of dissenting messages in the civic space.
