ABSTRACT
As the City of London successfully closed its doors to the world for the third time since Pierre de Coubertin’s 1894 revival of the Olympic Movement, much attention has now turned to the growing body of scholarship focused on Britain’s Olympic legacy. The end of the 2012 London Olympic Games has spawned a series of studies concerned with how vast sums of public expenditure will leave an enduring positive legacy for the people of London in particular and the UK in general (e.g. see Bernstock 2014). However, this worthy and necessary approach does run the risk of neglecting the historical context. For example, prior to the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the Centre of Olympic Studies was aligned to the School of History at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). This fruitful collaboration spawned important contributions to Australia’s sporting history such as Sport in the National Imagination (Cashman 2002) and Sport, Federation, Nation (Cashman, O’Hara, and Honey 2001). This work sat well alongside preliminary considerations about the legacy of the Sydney Games. The outstanding contribution made towards understanding Sydney’s legacy meant that the centre, renamed the Australian Centre for Olympic Studies, found a home at the Faculty of Business at the University of Technology Sydney despite the decision of UNSW to cease funding it (Adair 2010, 331). Here, the vital work into Sydney’s legacy has continued, but the changed organizational context has seen the historical aspect deemphasized. The Australian case provides a cautionary tale for Britain in the post-London era to avoid.
