ABSTRACT
This chapter considers recent developments affecting the organisation of the Olympics and other mega-events. It focuses on three of the main challenges that currently confront the Olympics. The chapter shows contemporary scale of mega-events can create temptations for organisers, athletes and governments to go way beyond the Olympic ideals and enter what we call the dark side' of the Olympics, and arguably sports mega-events generally. An explanation that stresses the social processes would give greater emphasis to the networks and financial systems of gambling which permeate contemporary sport, and also the processes that facilitate the operation of betting syndicates and the proliferating cultures of gambling, rather than prioritising a generic human condition. The 1984 Olympics has become regarded as the point at which commercialisation of the Games entered a new and more dramatic era. The economics of the gigantic global spectacle provide two problems for the Olympic movement.
