ABSTRACT
When a nation bids to host an Olympic Games, the process can be fraught with so many challenges that even winning consensus around the value of bidding can be difficult to achieve. Invariably, concerns are expressed by politicians, the public and the media about the significant amount of public funds that will be necessary to spend on staging the Games, a concern exacerbated by the fact that many previous Games have shown only limited evidence of financial or social benefits arising from the experience. Furthermore, objections are often expressed about the value of hosting a megaevent in a time of financial or political difficulties, where other priorities exist. Indeed, such anxieties arise for any nation that hosts a mega-event of such a scale as an Olympics. In fact, occasionally, the particular local circumstances of a nation can quickly change its ability to deliver the event. Indeed, so wide and diverse are the concerns of domestic interest groups that the process towards the eventual delivery of an Olympic Games can be incredibly fragile and, in some cases, impossible to realize. For instance, the 1908 Games were due to take place in Rome, but because of mounting concerns about the public cost of the Games and the eventual eruption of Mount Vesuvius, they were moved to London (McIntire 2009). Alternatively, the 1976 Winter Games were due to be staged in Denver, but owing to spiraling inflation rates, a grassroots
movement succeeded in voting out the Games, whereupon they were moved to Innsbruck (Sanko 1999). More recently, the construction of venues for the Athens 2004
Olympic Games was so delayed that debates took place within the media about whether the IOC would move the Games elsewhere at the last minute (Whyte 2000), an action that it is able to take should it decide that the host city has not honoured its obligations. In other cases, without overwhelming public support at the bid stage, it may be inconceivable for the IOC to award a city the Games. Both the Toronto 2008 and the Chicago 2016 bids are cases in point, where public opposition is reported to have been a factor in the Games being awarded elsewhere. Yet, perhaps the most well-known examples where national and global circumstances have disrupted the delivery of the Games were around the Berlin 1916, Tokyo and Helsinki 1940 Games,1 and the London 1944 Games (as well as the Winter Games counterparts) which were each cancelled because of the World Wars. Indeed, these are the only Games that have been cancelled in the history of the modern Olympics so far. Once the Games are won, the scale of the debate around their
value and the scrutiny under which the organizing authorities come reach an unprecedented level. Indeed, public opinion about the value of hosting the Games tends to dip dramatically from just before winning the bid to the weeks leading up to the Games (Cashman and Hughes 1999). Each and every action of the organizing committee and, at times, the activity of the Olympic movement more widely, may be subject to criticism and in need of public justification. For instance, on the approach to the Beijing 2008 Games, the British Olympic Association (BOA) released special guidelines that would govern the conduct of its athletes when in China, mindful of how these Games were being politicized. While the BOA may have intended these guidelines to protect its athletes from commercial or political exploitation, they were discussed in the public sphere as a restriction of British athletes’ human rights and, in this context, the Olympic Games were presented as having undermined freedom of speech (Leapman and Powell 2008). This level of scrutiny over organizers’ actions should not surprise
us; indeed, it is a crucial dimension of any democratic society. After
all, the Olympic Games bring considerable disruption to many national priorities, programmes and infrastructures, which in turn may jeopardize many peoples’ lives and this requires justification and transparency of decision-making. However, this level of scrutiny also helpfully articulates why matters of identity and representation are critical to staging an Olympic Games, since there is a considerable amount of public interest invested in their taking place. Thus, at the centre of this interrogation of the Games’ social value are questions over ownership, public expectations and whether they represent the interests and concerns of the bidding population and the wider Olympic movement beyond its financial stakeholders. In this context, the public discourse on the character of the
Games and how that intersects with the lived interests of communities that they affect can become central to what takes place over an Olympic hosting period. Moreover, considerations of national and local identity and addressing social priorities often become a pivotal point of debate during the Olympic Games hosting process, where discussions about what kind of Games they ought to be come to the fore. Indeed, since very early on in the history of the modern Games, they have been seen as a vehicle for articulating a nation’s identity (Collins 2007, McIntire 2009, Xin 2006). However, beyond symbolic statements, they have also been a gateway to changing the projected identity of a nation by creating ‘turning points’ in its history. For instance, Miller (1992) and Bridges (2008) discuss how the Seoul 1988 Olympic Games provided a route through which to develop new diplomatic relations for South Korea where previously there were none. These Games also fostered trade agreements that brought the country into the global economy. The present chapter considers how concerns about social issues
and identity have defined the Olympic Games in the past and what this may mean for their future. Initially, we outline some key moments in Olympic history when both planned and unplanned narratives about the Games have been pivotal in how they were perceived and subsequently remembered. Here, we also identify how the IOC has shaped the Olympic persona over the years and the challenge for host cities in aligning themselves with its ideals and expectations. Next, we consider what underpins a city’s desire to host an Olympic Games and the challenges over what local and national legacy mega-events can leave behind, a theme we take up
further in Chapter 8. It is around this construct that problems begin to arise, as the direction a city may take after hosting an Olympic Games may not suit the aspirations of everyone within its population. Thus, we conclude the chapter by examining aspects of identity that are recurrent sites of resistance around the Olympics, focusing particularly on the tensions between global, corporate and exclusive versus local, community and inclusive policies and processes. Throughout, we argue that the Olympic Games is a project of
identity formation, contestation and consolidation. In other words, it can give rise to new ideas about a population’s identity, serve to challenge established ideas, or reinforce clichés and stereotypes. These processes occur concurrently during the hosting period fuelled by personal as well as media-led cultural and political discourses. Sometimes, these ways of constructing identity may articulate serious social issues, which have important consequences for people’s perception of the value of the Games, as in the case of debates about forced evictions, where communities are displaced and destroyed to make way for new Olympic venues. Alternatively, the Games’ organizers may find a way of intervening in an emerging discourse and transforming it into something else. For example, in the case of the Athens 2004 Games, after months of criticism over their delayed venues, the organizers included a comedic film within the opening ceremony depicting construction workers in the stadium moving around at high speed to finish the stadium just in time for the ceremony (Murphy 2004).2 This diffused the sense of bad feeling around the criticisms about the stadiums, almost obscuring the importance of what were otherwise seen to be serious circumstances for Greece. Equally, the identity of a nation may be programmed into an Olympic Games’ assets via the use of symbols and branding motifs. For instance, for the London 2012 Games, the two mascots associated with the Olympic and Paralympic Games were named after important historical connections between the UK and these Games. Thus, Wenlock is the name of the mascot for the Olympic Games, after the Much Wenlock Games, the British contribution to reviving the Olympics in modern times. Alternatively, Mandeville is the name of the Paralympic mascot, named after Stoke Mandeville, the village in England which was the birthplace of Paralympic sport.
