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.

The Flame Relay and the Olympic Movement is the first book-length scholarly study in English of the contemporary Olympic flame relay. Reporting for the first time on years of intensive ethnographic research and organizational intervention, MacAloon literally follows the Olympic flame through twenty years of intercultural encounter, conflict, and negotiation. Focusing on the frequently harmonious, sometimes perilous encounters among Greek flame relay officials, cultural agents, and discourses, foreign Olympic Games organizing committees, and such transnational actors as the IOC and its corporate sponsors since 1984, a context is created for understanding the significance for the Olympic movement and for globalization studies of the 2004 Athens flame relay, the first to travel the entire world. Through intensive interviews and co-participations with leading Greek and American actors and the contributions of young Greek researchers who worked backstage on the relay, Bearing Light demonstrates how culturally parochial the managerial regime of "world's best practices" often turns out to be and yet how inescapable it has become for those who wish to communicate across cultural and political boundaries. This dilemma, the contributors argue, constitutes the practical form in which the struggle to preserve a sense of "Olympism" and "the Olympic Movement" against the demands and prerogatives of today's Olympic sports industry is being chiefly fought out. This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society

The Pan-American Games, begun officially in 1951 in Buenos Aires and held in every region of the western hemisphere, have become one of the largest multi-sport games in the world. 6,132 athletes from 41 countries competed in 48 sports in the 2015 Games in Toronto, Canada. The Games are simultaneously an avenue for the spread of the Olympic Movement across the Americas, a stage for competing ideologies of Pan-American unity, and an occasion for host city infrastructural stimulus and economic development. And yet until this volume, the Games have never been studied as a single entity from a scholarly viewpoint. Historicizing the Pan-American Games presents 12 original articles on the Games. Topics range from the origins of the Games in the period between the world wars, to their urban, hemispheric and cultural legacies, to the policy implications of specific Games for international sport. The entire collection is set against the shifting economic, social, political, cultural, sporting and artistic contexts of the turbulent western hemisphere. Historicizing the Pan-American Games makes a significant contribution to the literature on major games, Olympic sport and sport in the western hemisphere. This book was previously published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.

The Olympic Games is undoubtedly the greatest sporting event in the world, with over 200 countries competing for success. This important new study of the Olympics investigates why some countries are more successful than others. Which factors determine their failure or success? What is the relationship between these factors? And how can these factors be manipulated to influence a country's performance in sport? This book addresses these questions and discusses the theoretical concepts that explain why national sporting success has become a policy priority around the globe. Danyel Reiche reassesses our understanding of success in sport and challenges the conventional explanations that population size and economic strength are the main determinants for a country's Olympic achievements. He presents a theory of countries' success and failure, based on detailed investigations of the relationships between a wide variety of factors that influence a country's position in the Olympic medals table, including geography, ideology, policies such as focusing on medal promising sports, home advantage and the promotion of women. This book fills a long-standing gap in literature on the Olympics and will provide valuable insights for all students, scholars, policy makers and journalists interested in the Olympic Games and the wider relationship between sport, politics, and nationalism.

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This comprehensive collection provides an overview of social scientific perspectives on Olympic legacy, using specialist analyses and selected cases to illuminate the recurring anthropological, political, and sociological dimensions of the legacy debate. Drawing upon research conducted on the Beijing, Vancouver, Athens, London and Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games, it identifies the recurrent rhetoric that has characterised the legacy debate, alongside the harsh realities that contradict many legacies and aspirations. Fifteen researchers from six countries contribute a range of critical analytical studies which explore macro-perspectives on the shifting political economy symbolized at Beijing or in an over-reaching Greece, the soft power benefits perceived by the Rio 2016 organizers, the anthropological study of neighbourhood spaces threatened by corporate branding, and the apparatus of surveillance surrounding an Olympic Games. The symbolic importance of the Games is also captured in studies of volunteer motivations, labour and work initiatives, and the introduction of women's boxing at London 2012. In a comprehensive overview, Alan Tomlinson illuminates the rhetoric of successive Olympic cycles and the rise to prominence of the legacy question in that debate. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science.

The Olympic Games have evolved into the most prestigious sport event on the planet. As a consequence, each Games generates more and more interest from the academic community. Sociology, politics, geography and history have all played a part in helping to understand the meanings and implications of the Games. Heritage, too, offers invaluable insights into what we value about the Games, and what we would like to pass on to future generations. Each Olympic Games unquestionably represents key life-markers to a broad audience across the world, and the great events that take place within them become worthy of remembrance, celebration and protection. The more tangible heritage features are also evident; from the myriad artefacts and ephemera found in museums to the celebratory symbolism of past Olympic venues and sites that have become visitor attractions in their own right. This edited collection offers detailed and thought-provoking examples of these heritage components, and illustrates powerfully the breadth, passion and cultural significance that the Olympics engender. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies.

This book focuses on the processes of documenting the Beijing Olympics - ranging from the visual (television and film) to radio and the written word - and the meanings generated by such representations. What were the 'key' stories and how were they chosen? What was dramatised? Who were the heroes? Which 'clashes' were highlighted and how? What sorts of stories did the notion of 'human interest' generate? Did politics take a backseat or was the topic highlighted repeatedly? Thus, the focus was not on the success or failure of this event, but on the ways in which the Olympics Games, as international and historic events, are memorialised by observers. The key question that this book addresses is: How far would the Olympic coverage fall into the patterns of representation that have come to dominate Olympic reporting and what would China, as a discursive subject, bring to these patterns? This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

The 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games stand as the most profitable and arguably the most important event in the history of the modern Olympic movement. Fresh off the back of the financially disastrous Montreal Games of 1976 and the politically controversial Moscow Games of 1980, the Olympic movement returned to the United States for the sixth time in an attempt to salvage the economic viability and global prestige of the Olympics. The Los Angeles Olympics proved to be both provocative and polarizing. On the one hand they have been heralded as an overwhelming, transformative success, ushering the Olympic movement into the modern commercial age. On the other hand, critics have repudiated the Games as a manifestation of commercial excess and a platform for western political and cultural propaganda. In conjunction with the 30th anniversary of the Los Angeles Olympics, this volume examines their legacy. With an international collection of contributing scholars, this volume will span a range of global legacies, including the increasing commercialization of the Games, the changing participation of women, the Communist boycott movement, nationalism and sporting identity, and the modernization and California-cation of the Games. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

The London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics were seen as a success and the hosts were praised for the promotion of equality, tolerance and unity as well as inspiring a legacy to continue these values. This volume contains a collection of sociological case studies which critically assess the diverse impacts of London 2012 and its key controversies.

This book explores the biggest sporting event in the world through the lens in which most people witness it: the media. Traversing nations and media formats, contributors offer insights into the manner in which the Olympics is conveyed to the masses and the impact arising from the mass consumption of Olympic media in its plethora of dimensions. The book gleans insight from past Olympic media analyses, but focuses on the role media played within the 2012 London Summer Olympics. Using a variety of methodologies, the book underscores how the Olympic Games are more than just a sporting event but should be understood a vast mosaic of images and events that shape public understandings of nations, society, and the values that undergird such renderings. This book was published as a special section in Mass Communication & Society.

Modern Olympism emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as a philosophy of social reform that sought to use sport for the betterment of the world. It drew on a number of intellectual and material sources, including the ancient Greek heritage, philosophical ideas of Enlightenment, the English educational system, and the emerging spirit of industrial capitalism and internationalism. It is an eclectic and non-systematic body of knowledge, and has always been a controversial project. Indeed, in the words of its founder, Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937), Olympism is an 'unfinished symphony'. Interpretations of the fundamental tenets of Olympism concerning universalism, education, eligibility, independence from political and commercial interference, and fair play have been constantly negotiated and renegotiated through political, cultural, social, economic, and sporting struggles. These interpretations are reflected in various editions of the Olympic Charter and in a multitude of academic studies.Edited and introduced by Vassil Girginov, this new four-volume collection from Routledge brings together key primary-source materials and the very best scholarship and commentary to elucidate and explore the evolution and interpretations of Olympism and its practical manifestation in the modern Olympic Games. The collection includes archive materials (some of which are reproduced in facsimile to give users a strong sense of immediacy to the original texts), personal accounts of major figures, as well as critical scholarship. Olympic Studies will also make readily accessible the best research produced under the auspices of Routledge's ambitious 2012 Olympic Collection whereby over forty Olympic-focused journal special issues from a wide range of disciplines will appear during 2012 and 2013. Fully indexed and with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Olympic Studies is an essential work of reference. It is destined to be welcomed as a vital one-stop research tool.

In 1951 the University of San Francisco football team (The Dons) went undefeated and untied. Yet, despite being among the best college football teams of all time, the squad was not invited to play in a post season bowl game because two of its players were African-American. The team was offered the chance to compete without the players, but they unanimously refused on principle.

They were the 'magnificent eleven' that no one had ever heard of. The team exhibited a roster of players and personnel that read like a 'who's who' of gridiron heroes. This '51 team produced nine future NFL players; five made it to the Pro Bowl and three of those five were inducted into the Hall of Fame; the most ever from a single college team. Undefeated, Untied, and Uninvited goes behind the scenes to explore the successes and challenges as well as the unpredictable events that faced the Dons.

The Olympic Games have evolved into the most prestigious sport event on the planet. As a consequence, each Games generates more and more interest from the academic community. Sociology, politics, geography and history have all played a part in helping to understand the meanings and implications of the Games. Heritage, too, offers invaluable insights into what we value about the Games, and what we would like to pass on to future generations. Each Olympic Games unquestionably represents key life-markers to a broad audience across the world, and the great events that take place within them become worthy of remembrance, celebration and protection. The more tangible heritage features are also evident; from the myriad artefacts and ephemera found in museums to the celebratory symbolism of past Olympic venues and sites that have become visitor attractions in their own right. This edited collection offers detailed and thought-provoking examples of these heritage components, and illustrates powerfully the breadth, passion and cultural significance that the Olympics engender. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies.

London hosted the Olympic Games for the third time in 2012, a mega-event where the political, economic and social expectations could hardly be compared with the previous London Games of 1908 and 1948. In addition, the Olympic Games went back to Europe in 2012 after a long period where (apart from Athens in 2004) they were held by cities in other continents. In London, the world watched the Games. Continental Europe, however, generated a particular attitude based on the special relations it had developed historically with England. At the crossing point of history, cultural studies and geopolitics, this book provides new insights on the significance of the Olympic Games. It considers that the Games are the right window to look at both the past and the current relations between England and its closest continental neighbours. It will be ideal for students and academics working in sport sciences, cultural history, political science and European studies; amateur and professional sports historians; Olympic followers and experts in Olympic studies. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

In recent decades, five to ten times as many persons have turned out for the Olympic flame relay as have watched Olympic sports contests live. Flame Relays and the Struggle for the Olympic Movement: Bearing Light, the first anthropological analysis of the contemporary torch relay, exposes and interprets the transformation of the ritual across a 25-year period, from Los Angeles 1984 through the IOC's 2009 announcement that, in the aftermath of the politically contentious Beijing performance, there will be no more global relays. This volume offers a rare case study of continuity and change in a leading transnational and trans-cultural ritual form. Through data publicly revealed for the first time, the reader is carried fully backstage and into the conflicts and negotiations among Olympic organizing committees, the Greek Olympic movement, national governments, and transnational actors like the IOC, commercial sponsors, and operations management firms. Readers will come to know the leading flame relay authorities and practitioners, gaining a deeper understanding of the Olympic managerial revolution with its characteristic 'world's best practice' language. Analysis of the transnational flow of Olympic operations management offers important corrections to much existing globalization theory by demonstrating both how powerful and how culturally and politically parochial world's best practices can turn out to be. The dialectic between the cultural performance genres of ritual and spectacle provides a further intellectual architecture for these studies posing the question of whether the Olympic Movement will be able to survive the successes of the Olympic Sports Industry. This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

Olympic Stadia provides a comprehensive account of the development of stadia including but not limited to: developments in running tracks, the introduction of lighting, improvements in spectator viewing standards and the introduction of roofs. Written by a world-renowned expert on sports architecture, the book: Systematically analyses every stadium from Athens 1896 to Tokyo 2020 Provides drawings, plans, elevations, photographs and illustrations in full colour Considers the fundamental changes wrought by the incorporation of the Paralympic Games Looks at the impact on host cities and their urban infrastructure, and considers the long-term legacies and massive investments that Olympic stadia require Explores the effects of the demands of the world's TV broadcasters. An invaluable and beautiful resource for practical insight and inspiration, this book makes essential reading for anyone interested in Olympic stadia.

For more than a century, the Olympics have been the modern world's most significant sporting event. Indeed, they deserve much credit for globalizing sport beyond the boundaries of the Anglo-American universe, where it originated, into broader global realms. By the 1930s, the Olympics had become a global mega-event that occupied the attention of the media, the interest of the public and the energies of nation-states. Since then, projected by television, funded by global capital and fattened by the desires of nations to garner international prestige, the Olympics have grown to gargantuan dimensions. In the course of its epic history, the Olympics have left numerous legacies, from unforgettable feats to monumental stadiums, from shining triumphs to searing tragedies, from the dazzling debuts on the world's stage of new cities and nations to notorious campaigns of national propaganda. The Olympics represent an essential component of modern global history. The Olympic movement itself has, since the 1990s, recognized and sought to shape its numerous legacies with mixed success as this book makes clear. It offers ground-breaking analyses of the power of Olympic legacies, positive and negative, and surveys the subject from Athens in 1896 to Beijing in 2008, and indeed beyond. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

The book aims to outline the progress, problems and challenges of delivering a safe and secure Olympics in the context of the contemporary serious and enduring terrorist threat. The enormous media profile and symbolic significance of the Olympic Games, the history of terrorists aiming to use such high-profile events to advance their cause, and Al Qaeda's aim to cause mass casualties, all have major implications for the security of London 2012. Drawing on contributions from leading academics and practitioners in the field the book will assess the current terrorist threat, particularly focusing on terrorist targeting and how the Olympics might feature in this, before addressing particular response themes such as transport security, the role of surveillance, resilient designing of Olympic sites, the role of private security, and the challenge of inter-agency coordination. The book will conclude by providing an assessment of the legacy of Olympic security to date and will discuss the anticipated issues and dilemmas of the future. This book will be of interest to students of terrorism studies, security studies, counter-terrorism and sports studies.

President Vladimir Putin's Olympic venture put the workings of contemporary Russia on vivid display. The Sochi Olympics were designed to symbolize Russia's return to great power status, but subsequent aggression against Ukraine, large-scale corruption, and the doping scandal have become the true legacies of the games. The Kremlin's style of governance through mega-projects has had deleterious consequences for the country's development. Placing the Sochi games into the larger context of Olympic history, this book examines the political, security, business, ethnic, societal, and international ramifications of Putin's system.

The book aims to outline the progress, problems and challenges of delivering a safe and secure Olympics in the context of the contemporary serious and enduring terrorist threat. The enormous media profile and symbolic significance of the Olympic Games, the history of terrorists aiming to use such high-profile events to advance their cause, and Al Qaeda's aim to cause mass casualties, all have major implications for the security of London 2012. Drawing on contributions from leading academics and practitioners in the field the book will assess the current terrorist threat, particularly focusing on terrorist targeting and how the Olympics might feature in this, before addressing particular response themes such as transport security, the role of surveillance, resilient designing of Olympic sites, the role of private security, and the challenge of inter-agency coordination. The book will conclude by providing an assessment of the legacy of Olympic security to date and will discuss the anticipated issues and dilemmas of the future. This book will be of interest to students of terrorism studies, security studies, counter-terrorism and sports studies.

Beijing 2008: Preparing for Glory - Chinese Challenge in the 'Chinese Century' brings together international scholars with an interest in sport and politics and sinologists with an interest in China - past, present and future - to explore global reaction to the Beijing Olympics - China's anticipated moment of glory on the world stage. The Beijing Olympics is, first and foremost, a political act and assertion. It is also a statement of national intent, the culmination of ideological effort going back to 1949 and the outcome of political, social, cultural and economic change. From the moment of the birth of the 'New China' sport has been viewed as a means of internal and external projection illustrating the capacity of the system and people to more than hold their own with those of other nations. In short, sport has been the chosen 'stage' on which the Chinese perform in pursuit of world recognition, respect and esteem. This assertion is not hard to understand. China's 'century of humiliation' at the hands of first the West and then Japan remains a traumatic experience. Beijing 2008 is to assist the restoration of China's national self-esteem. He Zhenliang, Chairman of the IOC Commission for the Culture of Olympic Education, has remarked pointedly that the most significant outcome of the Beijing Games will be the elevation of the self-confidence and sense of pride of the Chinese people. Beijing 2008 will be an act of political self-renewal on the world stage. This Collection demonstrates that sport is inseparable from politics. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Drawing upon historical, cultural, economic and socio-demographic perspectives, this book examines the role of a sporting mega-event in promoting urban regeneration and social renewal. Comparing cities that have or will be hosting the event, it explores the political economy of the games and the changing role of the state in creating post-industrial metropolitan spaces. It evaluates the changing perceptions of the Olympic Games and the role of sport in the global media age in general and assesses the implication of 'mega-event' regeneration policies for local communities and their cultural, social and economic identities, with specific reference to east London and the Thames Gateway.

The collection starts from the premise that Olympism and the Olympic Games make sense only when they are placed within the broader national, colonial and post colonial contexts and argues that sport not only influences politics and vice-versa, but that the two are inseparable. Sport is not only political; it is politics. It is also culture and art. This collaboration is a first in global publishing, a mine of information for scholars, students and analysts. It demonstrates that Olympism and the Olympic movement in the modern context has been, and continues to be, socially relevant and politically important. Studies focus on national encounters with Olympism and the Olympic movement, with equal attention paid to document the growing nexus between sports and the media; sports reportage; as well as women and sports. Olympism asserts that the Olympic movement was, and is, of central importance to twentieth and twenty-first century societies. Finally, the collection demonstrates that the essence of Olympism and the Olympic movement is important only in so far as it affects societies surrounding it.

The Berlin Olympics, August 14, 1936. German rowers, dominant at the Games, line up against America's top eight-oared crew. Hundreds of millions of listeners worldwide wait by their radios. Leni Riefenstahl prepares her cameramen. Grantland Rice looks past the 75,000 spectators crowding the riverbank. Above it all, the Nazi leadership, flush with the propaganda triumph the Olympics have given their New Germany, await a crowning victory they can broadcast to the world. The Berlin Games matched cutting-edge communication technology with compelling sports narrative to draw the blueprint for all future sports broadcasting. A global audience--the largest cohort of humanity ever assembled--enjoyed the spectacle via radio. This still-novel medium offered a "liveness," a thrilling immediacy no other technology had ever matched. Michael J. Socolow's account moves from the era's technological innovations to the human drama of how the race changed the lives of nine young men. As he shows, the origins of global sports broadcasting can be found in this single, forgotten contest. In those origins we see the ways the presentation, consumption, and uses of sport changed forever.