ABSTRACT
The Olympic Games sells itself as the most prominent recurrent global event in the contemporary world. This chapter considers the parallel experiences of the leisure consumer in contemporary consumer culture, and assesses the extent to which it makes sense to talk of the Disneyfication of the Olympic Games. The outcome of the process of Disneyfication is a set of characteristics, or features, of the Disneyfied phenomenon. The chapter concludes with a several-point agenda of Olympic challenges. First, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) would do well to look closely at the elements that actually sustained it in its arrogated forms throughout its three-century spanning history. Second, it should review the place and profile of the Olympic partners, the sponsors, in the staging of the Games. Finally, if the IOC and its partners came clean in public, they should revise their rhetoric and recognize more openly the fantasy and the fun that fuel the contemporary Disneyfied Games.
