ABSTRACT
Modern Olympic Games have always attracted significant public attention, but the level of social, political and economic mobilization generated by the 2012 London Olympics, even before the games in Beijing in 2008 had taken place, has been truly unprecedented. It looks at the nature of the Olympic legacy enterprise both as a conceptual issue and a set of institutional practices. The chapter examines the delivery of the sports participation vision (i.e., creating sustainable sports development) by using two original case studies. One focuses on the English Volleyball Association, which oversees an Olympic sport, and the other involves a community initiative, StreetGames. The modern Olympic Games can be seen as the first major international sports development project. It emerged as a reaction to the dissatisfaction with the process of capitalist accumulation and the poor fitness of youth experienced by the founders of the modern Olympic movement, in particular Baron Pierre de Coubertin.
