How do Olympic legacies come about? This book offers an alternative approach to the study of Olympic and mega-sport event legacy, challenging how legacy is conceptualised and practised. It shifts the focus from legacy as a retrospective concept concerned with what has been left behind after the Games, to a prospective one interested in actions and interactions stimulated by the Games. The book argues that creating Olympic legacy is a continuing four-stage process involving 'investing' (the accumulated common Olympic cultural capital), 'interpelling' (forming a trusteeship relationship where one party undertakes to change the capacity of another), 'developing' (ensuring participation in interactions and resource development) and 'codifying' (documenting, sharing and remembering legacies so they become cultural capital). It presents a developmental approach to the Olympics which involves vision, trustees and trusteeship and is concerned with capacity building at individual, organisational and societal levels. Thinking of Olympic legacy as capacity building allows seeing the goal of legacy as an embodiment of the aspirations of the Olympic Movement and the Games to introduce radical change in society by transforming its structure. Rethinking Olympic Legacy is essential reading for all students and scholars within an interest in the Olympics, as well as for administrators, policymakers and planners involved with mega-sport events.

The Olympic Games is unquestionably the largest and most important sporting event in the world. Yet who exactly is accountable for its successes and failures? This book examines the legitimacy and accountability of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). This non-governmental organisation wields extraordinary power, but there is no democratic basis for its authority. This study questions the supremacy of the IOC, arguing that there is a significant accountability deficit. Investigating the conduct of the IOC from an international legal perspective, the book moves beyond a critique of the IOC to explore potential avenues for reform, means of improving democratic procedures and increasing accountability. If the Olympics are to continue to be our most celebrated sporting event, those who organise them must be answerable to the citizens that they can potentially harm as well as benefit. Full of original insights into the inner workings of the IOC, this book is essential reading for all those interested in the Olympics, sport policy, sport management, sport mega-events, and the law.

Prior to the outbreak of World War II, the British presided over the largest Empire in world history, a vast transoceanic and transcontinental realm of dominions, colonies, protectorates and mandates that covered over one-quarter of the world's land mass and comprised a population of over 450-million subjects. Spanning Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania, over fifty modern nations-currently recognized by the International Olympic Committee-were governed and controlled by the British crown at some stage prior to the gradual dissolution of the Empire. The British World and the Five Rings seeks to explore the relationship between the former British Empire and the Olympic Movement. It pays due regard to the settler dominions, but it also addresses those territories who were less willing partners in the British imperial project. In doing so, the tendency of so-called 'British World' histories to promote an apologia for Empire is rejected in favour of a critical approach to imperialism. Combining thorough research with engaging and accessible writing, The British World and the Five Rings is applicable to many fields of Olympic scholarship making it a central work in the growing field of sports studies. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

Lausanne, the Swiss city IOC (International Olympic Committee) President Juan Antonio Samaranch honored with the title "Olympic capital" in 1994, is now the administrative capital of world sport. The past century has presented Olympism with many challenges and that continues to be the case today; the issues may have changed, but they are no less numerous. Controversies over phony amateurism, the two Chinas and the creation of a modern Olympia have been resolved, only to be replaced by questions of governance, compliance, strategy, responsible management, the size of the Games, the scarcity of bids and new forms of doping and corruption. All these themes are examined in the articles that make up this book published about 100 years after the establishment of the IOC's headquarters in Lausanne. This book was originally published as a special edition of Sport in Society.

Olympic Games are sold to host city populations on the basis of legacy commitments that incorporate aid for the young and the poor. Yet little is known about the realities of marginalized young people living in host cities. Do they benefit from social housing and employment opportunities? Or do they fall victim to increased policing and evaporating social assistance? This book answers these questions through an original ethnographic study of young people living in the shadow of Vancouver 2010 and London 2012. Setting qualitative research alongside critical analysis of policy documents, bidding reports and media accounts, this study explores the tension between promises made and lived reality. Its eight chapters offer a rich and complex account of marginalized young people's experiences as they navigate the possibilities and contradictions of living in an Olympic host city. Their stories illustrate the limits to the promises made by Olympic bidding and organizing committees and raise important questions about the ethics of public funding for such mega-events. This book will be fascinating reading for anyone interested in the Olympics, sport and social exclusion, and sport and politics, as well as for those working in the fields of youth studies, social policy and urban studies.

The Olympic Games have become a subject of major importance to students, academics, sports bodies, politicians, urban planners, and the public at large. The Olympic Rings are among the most recognised symbols in the world, and there are few other cultural phenomena that attract such a significant following in the popular media or such widespread support among the nations of the world. "Global Olympics: Historical and Sociological Studies of the Modern Games" draws together some of the world's leading scholars on critical issues emerging from ancient Olympic contests, and over one hundred years of modern Olympic history. A wide range of expertise permits the authors to address these issues from varied perspectives, while encompassing an in-depth assessment of the current literature and debates on the Olympics. This book will serve as an interdisciplinary resource for undergraduate and graduate students alike, as well as for the growing cohort of researchers interested in understanding and explaining the historical and sociological significance of the Games.

Live broadband streaming of the 2008 Beijing Olympics accounted for 2,200 of the estimated 3,600 total hours shown by the American NBC-Universal networks. At the 2012 London Olympics, unprecedented multi-platforming embraced online, mobile devices, game consoles and broadcast television, with the BBC providing 2,500 hours of live coverage, including every competitive event, much in high definition and some in 3D. The BBC also had 12 million requests for video on mobile phones and 9.2 million browsers on its mobile Olympics website and app. This pattern will only intensify at future sport mega events like the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics, both of which will take place in Brazil. Increasingly, when people talk of the screen that delivers footage of their favorite professional sport, they are describing desktop, laptop, and tablet computer screens as well as television and mobile handsets. Digital Media Sport analyzes the intersecting issues of technological change, market power, and cultural practices that shape the contemporary global sports media landscape. The complexity of these related issues demands an interdisciplinary approach that is adopted here in a series of thematically-organized essays by international scholars working in media studies, Internet studies, sociology, cultural studies, and sport studies. .

The African American struggle for civil rights in the twentieth century is one of the most important stories in American history. With all the information available, however, it is easy for even the most enthusiastic reader to be overwhelmed. In Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement, Yohuru Williams has synthesized the complex history of this period into a clear and compelling narrative. Considering both the Civil Rights and Black Power movements as distinct but overlapping elements of the Black Freedom struggle, Williams looks at the impact of the struggle for Black civil rights on housing, transportation, education, labor, voting rights, culture, and more, and places the activism of the 1950s and 60s within the context of a much longer tradition reaching from Reconstruction to the present day. Exploring the different strands within the movement, key figures and leaders, and its ongoing legacy, Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement is the perfect introduction for anyone seeking to understand the struggle for Black civil rights in America.

The Olympics have developed into the world's premier sporting event. They are simultaneously a competitive exhibition and a grand display of cooperation that bring together global cultures on ski slopes, shooting ranges, swimming pools and track ovals. Given their scale in the modern era, the Games are a useful window for better comprehending larger cultural, social and historical processes, argues Jules Boykoff, an academic social scientist and a former Olympic athlete. In Activism and the Olympics, Boykoff provides a critical overview of the Olympic industry and its political opponents in the modern era. After presenting a brief history of Olympic activism, he turns his attention to on-the-ground activism through the lens of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics and the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Here we see how anti-Olympic activists deploy a range of approaches to challenge the Olympic machine, from direct action and the seizure of public space to humour-based and online tactics. Drawing on primary evidence from myriad personal interviews with activists, journalists, civil libertarians and Olympics organisers, Boykoff angles in on the Games from numerous vantages and viewpoints. Although modern Olympic authorities have strived - even through the Cold War era - to appear apolitical, Boykoff notes, the Games have always been the site of hotly contested political actions and competing interests. During the last thirty years, as the Olympics became an economic juggernaut, they also generated numerous reactions from groups that have sought to challenge the event's triumphalism and pageantry. The 21st century has seen an increased level of activism across the world, from the Occupy Movement in the United States to the Arab Spring in the Middle East. What does this spike in dissent mean for Olympic activists as they prepare for Sochi, which will host the 2014 Winter Games and Rio de Janeiro, where the 2016 Summer Olympics will take place?

Sports are the opiate of the people, particularly in the United States, Europe, and parts of South America. Globally, billions of fans feverishly focus on the summer and winter Olympics. In theory, international fraternalism is boosted by these "friendly competitions," but often national rivalries eclipse the theoretical amity. How the Olympics have dealt with racism over the years offers a window to better understanding these dynamics. Since their revival in 1896, the modern Olympics were periodically agitated by political and moral conundrums. Racial tensions, the topic of this volume, reached their apex under the polarizing presidency of Avery Brundage. Race in sports cannot be disentangled from societal problems, nor can race or sports be fully understood separately. Racial conflict must be contextualized. Racism and the Olympics explores the racial landscape against which a number of major disputes evolved. The book covers various topics and events in history that portray discrimination within Olympic games, such as the Nazi games of 1936, the black American protest on the victory stand in Mexico City's Olympics, as well as international political forces that removed South Africa and Rhodesia from the Olympics. Robert G. Weisbord considers the role of international politics and the criteria that should be used to determine nations that are selected to take part in and serve as venues for the Olympic Games.

When the general public follow the Olympic Games on television, on the internet, even in the newspapers, they feel like they have themselves experienced the performances of the athletes. This book explores whether it is ever possible to experience the Olympic Games as an athletic event without considering the effect of the media. It addresses a multitude of ways in which the intermediary of media production alters the experience of the Olympics. Spectators watching Olympic events from the stands are less subjected to the language of the commentators, journalists, and even the athlete interviews as they form impressions and understandings of the games. However, even those who sit in the stands for the opening ceremonies or walk down the streets of the Olympic Village and the host city are treated to media spectacles that are intentionally produced to display the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the host country and its Olympic Committee. This book performs the important task of analysing ways in which the media serves as both an integral component and an arbiter of the Games for society. This book was originally published as a special issue of Mass Communication and Society.

In recent decades ceremonies stood in Olympiads as both vehicles of cultural values and shows embracing the banal and the everyday. But how much do we understand them as forms of public art? This book examines the London 2012 opening and closing ceremonies and the handover event to Rio for the 2016 Olympics as articulations of national and cosmopolitan belonging. It is argued that embodied and projected performances of Britishness and Brazilianness embraced both artistic styles and the contemporary digital turn, refinement and banality. Combinations of art and technology reflected a vision of humanity in motion complying with the Olympic values of fairness, beauty and embodied well-being. The three ceremonial performances supported imaginative travel on stage, on big screens and in musical genres. This travel, at once mediated, embodied and experiential, created an ideal form of 'human': a tornadoros. A creative worker and a tourist, the tornadoros manipulates audio-visual narratives of culture and identity for global Olympic audiences. Spanning Sociology, Sports Studies, Culture and Media Studies, Performance Studies and Tourism Studies, this is a highly interdisciplinary and original perspective on the Olympics.

The first summer Youth Olympic Games (YOG) were held in Singapore in 2010 and the first winter Youth Olympic Games in Innsbruck in 2012. The IOC hopes that the YOG will encourage young people to be more active and that they will bring the Olympic movement closer to its original founding values. This is the first book to be published on the Youth Olympic Games. It critically examines the origins of the Games and the motives of the Games organisers, as well as the organisation and management of the Games and their wider impact and significance. The first part of the book discusses the relationship between the YOG and the ideology of Olympism, in the context of broader developments in youth sport competitions. The second part investigates a wide range of managerial aspects including the bidding process, finance, the prominent role of young people on the organising committees and as volunteers, the role of media and sponsors, and the distinctive competition structure. The final part of the book assesses the current and likely future impact of the YOG on the host cities and countries, the IOC and on national youth sport policies. The Youth Olympic Games is essential reading for any researcher, advanced student or policy maker with an interest in Olympic Studies, sports development, sport policy, youth sport or event management.

This book contains an international collection of essays by leading philosophers of sport on the ethics and philosophy of the Olympic Games. The essays consider a range of topics including critical reflections on nationalism and internationalism within the Olympic movement, sexism in Olympic marketing and sponsorship, the preservation and corruption of Olympism, the underlying ideology of the Olympic Games, the inequalities of perception in ability and disability as it informs our understanding of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and comparisons between ancient and modern interpretations of the meaning and significance of the Olympic Games. This book will be of interest to historians, philosophers, and sociologists of sports, as well as to the sporting public who simply want to know more about the grounding ideas behind the greatest show on earth.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Sport, Ethics and Philosophy.

Olympic Aspirations: Realised and Unrealised surveys more than a century of the Olympic Movement's promotion of Olympic ideals internationally. The idea for Olympic Aspirations emerged at the world-renowned annual Beijing Academic Forum just months after the city hosted the impressive 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. One section of the Forum was devoted to the impact of the Olympic Movement on China and on China's image in the world. The tone at times was too self-congratulatory for some present. The critical discussion that continued into late 2010 inspired this book. Olympic Aspirations is a companion volume to the well-received Olympic Legacies: Intended and Unintended and draws on expertise from academics in all parts of the world. Both volumes have a similar purpose: to record Olympic ideals achieved but more importantly, to stimulate reflection on those as yet unachieved. Both are constructive in approach, positive in tone and optimistic in attitude. Olympic Aspirations offers original and insightful arguments that address the actions the Olympic Movement has taken to improve the Games. It argues that these actions are as yet incomplete. In concert with Olympic Legacies, it presents two sides of the same coin minted to advance the purity of the Olympic 'coinage'. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

As London sought to use the Olympics to achieve an ambitious programme of urban renewal in the relatively socially deprived East London it attracted global attention and sparked debate. This book provides an in-depth study of the transformation of East London as a result of the 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. Government and event organisers use legacies of urban renewal to justify hosting the world's leading sports mega-event, this book examines and evaluates those legacies. The London Olympics and Urban Development: the mega-event city is composed of new research, conducted by academics and policy makers. It combines case study analysis with conceptual insight into the role of a sports mega-events in transforming the city. It critically assesses the narrative of legacy as a framework for legitimizing urban changes and examines the use of this framework as a means of evaluating the outcomes achieved. This book is about that process of renewal, with a focus on the period following the 2012 Games and the diverse social, political and cultural implications of London's use of the narrative of legacy.

Improbable, heart-wrenching, and uplifting, Jeremiah Brown's journey from novice rower to Olympic silver medallist in under four years is a story about chasing a goal with everything you've got. After nearly being incarcerated at age seventeen and becoming a father at nineteen, Jeremiah Brown manages to grow up into a responsible young adult. But while juggling the demands of a long-term relationship, fatherhood, mortgage payments, and a nine-to-five banking career, he feels something is missing. A new goal captures his imagination: What would it take to become an Olympian? Guided by a polarizing coach, Brown and his teammates plumb the depths of physical and mental exertion in pursuit of a singular goal. The 4 Year Olympian is a story of courage, perseverance, and overcoming self-doubt, told from the perspective of an unlikely competitor.

The London 2012 Paralympic Games - the biggest, most accessible and best-attended games in the Paralympics' 64-year history - came with an explicit aim to "transform the perception of disabled people in society," and use sport to contribute to "a better world for all people with a disability." This social agenda offered the potential to re-frame disability; to symbolically challenge "ableist" ideology and to offer a reinvention of the (dis)abled body and a redefinition of the possible. This edited collection investigates what has and is happening in relation to these ambitions. The book is structured around three key questions: 1. What were the predominant mediated narratives surrounding the Paralympics, and what are the associated meanings attached to them? 2. How were the Paralympics experienced by media audiences (both disabled and non-disabled)? 3. To what extent did the 2012 Paralympics inspire social change? Each section of this book is interspersed with authentic "voices" from outside academia: broadcasters, athletes and disabled schoolchildren.

The Politics of the Olympics: A Survey provides information on and analysis of the relationship between politics and the Olympic Games. It is argued and demonstrated throughout the book that sport and politics have been and are intimately connected and nowhere is this relationship more apparent than in the Olympic Games. The essay chapters, including an editorial introduction, are written by a variety of academic experts. They focus on the politics of the Olympic movement, the politics of hosting the Games, the political implications of performance enhancement, and gender, terrorism and physical impairment within the Olympic context. The remaining chapters are case studies that are specific to certain countries or regions - Germany during the rise to power of National Socialism, Eastern Europe in the Cold War era, South Korea and Taiwan. Each chapter is accompanied by a select bibliography. The A-Z Glossary provides up-to-date and concise information on famous Olympians, presidents of the International Olympic Committee, specific events, boycotts and demonstrations - each of which has been politically significant in the history of the Games. Entries are cross-referenced for ease of use. A map of the venues for the Olympic Games is also included.

When the general public follow the Olympic Games on television, on the internet, even in the newspapers, they feel like they have themselves experienced the performances of the athletes. This book explores whether it is ever possible to experience the Olympic Games as an athletic event without considering the effect of the media. It addresses a multitude of ways in which the intermediary of media production alters the experience of the Olympics. Spectators watching Olympic events from the stands are less subjected to the language of the commentators, journalists, and even the athlete interviews as they form impressions and understandings of the games. However, even those who sit in the stands for the opening ceremonies or walk down the streets of the Olympic Village and the host city are treated to media spectacles that are intentionally produced to display the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the host country and its Olympic Committee. This book performs the important task of analysing ways in which the media serves as both an integral component and an arbiter of the Games for society. This book was originally published as a special issue of Mass Communication and Society.

The pentathlon, comprising competition in the discus, javelin, long jump, sprint, and wrestling, was hailed as the ultimate test of athletic versatility and remained a staple of the ancient Greek Olympic Games, Crown Games and Pan-Hellenic festivals for 1,200 years. Still, there is little scholarly consensus over many major aspects of the event. This detailed exploration of the ancient pentathlon explores the nature of the spectacle, the method of determining a victor, the five sub-events of which the pentathlon is composed, and the order in which they occurred. It also chronicles the history of the event and its champions, the recognition of ancient pentathletes, and considers the event's 18-year modern Olympic history and its influence on its contemporary counterpart, the decathalon. A record book and glossary complete this fresh look at one of the ancient world's most renowned sporting competitions.

1968 was a year of protest in civil society (Prague, Paris, Chicago) and a year of protest in sport. After a world-wide campaign, the anti-apartheid movement succeeded in barring South Africa from the Olympic Games, while US athletes from the Olympic Project for Human Rights used the medals podium to decry the racism of North America. Meanwhile, students in Mexico demonstrated against social priorities in Mexico, the host of the 1968 Games. These events contributed significantly to the rejection of the idea that sports are apolitical, and stimulated the scholarly study of sport across the social sciences. Leading up to the Beijing Olympic Games, similar dynamics were played out across the globe, while a campaign was underway to boycott the 'Genocide Olympics'. The volume, To Remember is to Resist, came out of a three-day conference on sports, human rights and social change hosted by the University of Toronto forty years after Mexico and eighty days before the Beijing Opening Ceremony. The contributions to this volume capture the memories of activists who were "on the ground" using sport as a site for the struggle for human rights and provide scholarly examinations of past and current human rights movements in sport. This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

On July 6, 1912, King Gustaf V of Sweden inaugurated the Fifth Olympiad at the Olympic Stadium in Stockholm. In the following weeks, 2,380 competitors from 27 nations representing all five continents participated in well-organized competitions in perfect weather conditions. The largest Olympics to date, the Stockholm Games have thus gone down in history as the Sunshine Olympics, or ""the Swedish Masterpiece."" Since that achievement, and despite numerous attempts by other Swedish cities, Sweden has not yet managed to host the Olympic Games again. This work examines the 1912 Stockholm Olympics from a variety of perspectives from different academic disciplines, exploring the preparations, organization, competitions, participants, and spectators, as well as the continuing significance of the 1912 Games to sport Sweden, the future of Olympic movement, and Swedish society.

In most accounts of Olympic history across the world, India's Olympic journey is a mere footnote. This book is a corrective. Drawing on newly available and hitherto unused archival sources, it demonstrates that India was an important strategic outpost in the Olympic movement that started as a global phenomenon at the turn of the twentieth century. Among the questions the authors answer are: When and how did the Olympic ideology take root in India? Who were the early players and why did they appropriate Olympic sport to further their political ambitions? What explains India's eight consecutive gold medals in Olympic men's hockey between 1928 and 1956 and what altered the situation drastically, so much so that the team failed to qualify for the 2008 Beijing Games? India and the Olympics also explores why the Indian elite became obsessed with the Olympic ideal at the turn of the twentieth century and how this obsession relates to India's quest for a national and international identity. It conclusively validates the contention that the essence of Olympism does not reside in medals won, records broken or television rights sold as ends in themselves. Particularly for India, the Olympic movement, including the relevant records and statistics, is important because it provides a unique prism to understand the complex evolution of modern Indian society.

Sports, and in particular the Olympic Games, are enjoying a rapid increase in interest among social scientists worldwide, who see them as important "public events." This volume offers the first analysis of the Winter Olympic Games, primarily based on the Lillehammer Games of 1994. The authors identify "olympism" as a key agent in the modernization process and, more specifically, ask how the winter games, as a mega-event, relate to Norwegian culture and ethos. The authors of these specially commissioned papers examine various aspects of this encounter, including problems such as gender as related to nature and culture, masculinity and heroism, national identity and invention of tradition, the impact of venue construction on a traditional cultural landscape, the ideological criticism of the I.O.C. as it emerged, dramatically, before the opening of the Games and the conflict between the Norwegians and the Greeks over the ritual status of the two flames used during the torch relay, one from Olympia and one from Morgedal in Telemark, "the cradle of skiing."