Olympic Cities: 2012 and the Remaking of London

Iain MacRury, Gavin Poynter, Gavin Poynter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351913966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique publique en matière d'aménagement du territoire

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.

PART 1
The Modern Games and Social Change

1
Sport, Spectacle and Society: Understanding the Olympics

Michael Rustin

What are the Olympic Games? Obviously, they are the world’s leading festival of sports. The International Olympic Committee, the legal owner of ‘the Olympic Games’, likes to refer to the Olympic Movement as the collective social embodiment of the sporting ideals to which it is committed. It traces these ideals and this commitment all the way back to the Olympic Games of ancient Greece, which were revived in 1896 after a 1,500 year lapse of time by the visionary Pierre de Coubertin. Coubertin¹

¹ There is a considerable literature about Coubertin and the development of Olympism (see, for example, Loland 1995). His writings are available as de Coubertin (2000).

provided the philosophy for this new movement. Paragraph Two of the Fundamental Charter of the Olympic Games includes his formulation:

Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the quality of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles. (http://www.olympic.org/uk/organisation/missions/charter_uk.asp)

Consistent with this proclaimed commitment to moral and aesthetic values, the modern Olympic Games are framed by ceremonies. These include the worldwide procession of the Olympic Flame, carried by athletes and notables for hundreds of miles in many countries, the choreographed opening and closing Ceremonies, attended by thousands and viewed by billions on television worldwide, and the medal presentations to the successful contestants in every field of sport represented in the Games, with their national anthems and flags. All this gives the Games an aura, an aspect of the sacred in the broadest sense of that term.

It thus seems a triumph in its own right to be the host city and nation for the Games, when the four-yearly prize is awarded. The competition to welcome the Olympics to one’s country seems an opportunity to contribute to, and share in, something of honour and value, to be a distinction for the hosts, and a source of pride for its citizens. This is perceived to be the case for the London Olympics of 2012. It is expected that the nation, city, and even the East London region of the city, as places, and countless enterprises, organisations and individuals, will share in the aura and bounty which the Games is to bring.

However, the controversies surrounding the processing of the Olympic Flame for the Beijing Olympics of 2008 have already reminded us that the Olympic Games are about more than Games. The Chinese government, like most governments who host the Olympics, hope that the Games will show off their country and, in this case, their capital, to great advantage. Major architectural developments and urban improvements have been undertaken to provide a worthy showcase for the Games, and to place its host country and city in the forefront of modernity. Yet while the Chinese government pursues this agenda, Tibetans and their sympathisers follow a different one. ‘Does a nation which is deficient in its respect for human rights have a moral entitlement to hold the Games?’ was the question they choose to put to the world. They took the opportunity posed by the display of the Olympic Torch through many of the world’s cities, over a period of several months, to assert their cause. The immense global visibility of the Olympics, now the essence of its commanding position as a world spectacle, was thus also turned into a resource for protest, which transformed what was originally envisaged as a ‘showing of the Olympic flame’ in many local and at most national contexts, into a political demonstration, which gathered participants worldwide as each phase of the display of the Torch was shown on television. Nothing could have more clearly demonstrated that the Olympics Games is an event with dimensions wider than those of sport.

Remarks made by the International Olympic Committee about the risks to the ‘Olympic Brand’ incurred by these scenes of protest revealed the commercial aspects of the Games, as the conflict between the Chinese government and its Tibetan and Tibetan-sympathising opponents revealed its political dimensions. It was indeed surprising to see the term ‘brand’, whose origin lies in marketing but which has now become an almost universal signifier of reputation, used without embarrassment about an event whose essence was once defined as being above considerations of commerce.

In reality, the ‘Olympic Movement’ and its proprietary International Olympic Committee is an institution of a very particular and modern kind, committed to its own advancement, as are most worldly and even many spiritual institutions. The Olympics are difficult to characterise, compared with many more familiar types of entity. The Olympic Games are ‘stateless’, though they depend always on finding a territorial location within nations, and on the support of Local Olympic Committees, sporting associations, and governments, in many nations. It is not a profit-making corporation operating in a straightforward commercial market, even though it is highly dependent on transactions with the corporate world, and generates and spends vast sums of money during its four-yearly cycle of Games. Nor is it a governmental organisation, though it depends on the support and involvement of governments, without whose commitment and investments no significant Games would take place.

The Olympic Games belongs to an emergent type of ‘globalised’ institution, operating in both an international market-place, and an intergovernmental space of cooperation, competition, negotiations, and rules. It also occupies an important cultural and even moral space, as a celebration of a sphere of values, now recognised and cultivated across the world. One can hardly give an account of contemporary popular culture without recognising the great importance in it of competitive sport. This involves as its primary activity the cultivation and development of many kind of physical and bodily prowess, strength, speed, and grace. Thus the Olympics exists in the sphere of markets, of states, and of culture, occupying, with other comparable entities, an increasingly large space in these hybrid worlds.

Sport and Contemporary Culture

Any adequate description of popular culture now has to take account of the leading role of competitive sport within it. In earlier days when the term culture was mostly used to refer what to we now call ‘high culture’, it was usual to think of sport as belonging to a different and indeed lower sphere of life. But the redefinition of culture which has taken place in the last fifty years, intellectually informed by anthropological ideas of culture as an inclusive description of a way of life,²

² In Britain, the work of Richard Hoggart (1957) and Raymond Williams (1961) were influential in bringing about this democratic change of definitions.

and by a democratic rejection of cultural hierarchy, has changed all that. In so far as what we term the culture of a society is now taken to include all its forms of expressive and symbolic behaviour, its scope is much broader. Culture, in Raymond Williams’ phrase, has become ordinary (Williams 1958). It includes not only its high literature, music, art and drama, but also its popular literature, music, and its mass media. And not only these explicitly artistic forms of expression, but also, for example, the forms of design, cuisine, fashion, and the patterns of everyday speech prevailing in a society and its sub-cultures. This is because it can be seen that all these social activities are recognisably patterned and shaped in every society in relation to its prevailing ideas of the beautiful and the ugly, the normal and the deviant, the refined and the vulgar, or whatever particular normative antitheses hold sway in a given social order. When Delia Smith in her television cookery lessons shows her audience how they can make attractive dishes which nevertheless allow them to take ‘short-cuts’ or to ‘cheat’ by the standards of haute cuisine, she positions her programme in a definite cultural niche, one which seeks to make reasonable quality achievable within everyday limits of time and skill. It is clear that in any such broader conception of culture, sport has a central place.

Sport involves as its primary activity the cultivation and development of many kinds of physical and bodily prowess, strength, speed, and grace. To acknowledge that sport has an important place in many cultures is to reject the devaluation and denigration of the bodily and the physical, compared with the mental and the spiritual, which was a long-standing aspect of both Christian and Enlightenment cultures.³

³ Thomas Dixon’s From Passions to Emotions (2003) gives an account of the negative view of the passions taken by St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas from the first tradition, and by Descartes at the start of the second.

When the Olympic Movement sought in the 1890s to identity itself with the original Olympic Games of ancient Greece, it was proposing the revival of norms and values which had been largely forgotten in the intervening eras. (The physical cults of the Roman period, with the central place that they gave to armed combat to the death, were regarded with greater ambivalence, because of Christian notions of the sacredness of human life, and the fact that Christians had at one time been prime victims in the Roman arena.)⁴

⁴ The revival of the ‘Olympic ideal’, in the 1890’s, coincided with the beginnings of modern archaeological investigations of the ancient world, and shared some of the same implicit preferences for ancient over Christian values as were expressed in the philosophy of Nietzsche.

and while the traditions of sports since the Greeks give a central place to competition, which is as central to the Olympic Games as it ever was, the idea of the cultivation of the body and its capabilities and aesthetic properties is broader than this. Dance and keep-fit have developed as broadly-based activities, parallel to those of sports themselves, in part expressing a reaction by women against the idea that physical activity and culture has to be competitive for there to be any point in it.

The great sociologist Norbert Elias (1939/1978) and his disciples developed an argument which gave a place to sport as part of the ‘civilising process’ which has taken place in western societies since the Middle Ages. Elias argued that the inhibition and cultural regulation of bodily impulses and appetites – the development of rules governing the bodily functions of eating and drinking, spitting, defecation, physical violence, sexual behaviour – had been a central feature of the emergence of ‘civilised’ social forms,⁵

⁵ Iain MacRury has pointed out to me that the curbing of spitting is indeed now a preoccupation of the organisers of the Beijing Olympic Games, in pursuit of a ‘more civilised lifestyle’. See http://en.beijing2008.cn/news/olympiccities/beijing/n214259657.shtml.

which depended on the normal observance of complex and usually hierarchically ordered social norms.⁶

⁶ As Zigmunt Bauman (1979) pointed out when The Civilising Process was translated into English in 1978, nearly 40 years after its first publication in German, Elias had shown how the thesis of Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents (1929) concerning the necessary repression and sublimation of instinctual impulses could be made the basis of an interpretation of the social history of modernity.

In this context, Elias and Dunning (1986) at the University of Leicester were able to show that sport had become an essential element in the ‘civilising’ process of inhibition and sublimation. In competitive sports, violence, aggression, competition and conflict were given a modulated and regulated form. (This is also incidentally true of homoerotic attraction and desire, both in the bonding of teams, and in the love and admiration of sporting heroes, which find a tacit place in sports.) It is a commonplace now that it is better that nationalistic antagonisms should be played out in international sporting championships than on the battlefield. The violent passions aroused both on the field of competition, but, more strikingly, among thousands of sports fans and followers, shows how powerful the sentiments of antagonism which are given expression in sporting competitions can be.⁷

⁷ Franklin Foer’s book, How Soccer Rules the World (2004) gives an illuminating account of the relations between societal violence and the followings of football, including contexts such as those of the Balkans at the time of the break-up of Yugoslavia, when gang leaders on the football terraces morphed into paramilitary thugs and warlords. Foer describes the extreme and often racialised antagonisms which pervade many football followings, and are expressed in routine chants and songs, though this dimension is usually censored out of mass media coverage of matches.

Sport can sometimes be a focus of symbolic social integration and conflict-resolution, as the celebration in France of the triumph of its multi-ethnic football team in the 1998 World Cup showed.

These analyses enable us to see sports, the Olympics included, as occupying a key place in the expressive life of societies and the different groups of which they are made up. Sports encode social values and social differences, and become prisms through which some of the central preoccupations, both aestheti...