The Olympic Legacy

Social Scientific Explorations

Alan Tomlinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317379126
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Olympic legacies: recurrent rhetoric and harsh realities

Alan Tomlinson

Centre for Research and Development, Faculty of Arts, University of Brighton, UK

This article traces the genesis of the principle of legacy as it has featured in Olympic discourse, and become enshrined in the expressed philosophy of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), so shaping elements in the process of bidding by cities to stage the Olympic Games, in both their winter and summer manifestations. The article shows how Olympic bidders have increasingly mobilised the idea of legacy, and how event by event over the last quarter of a century, evaluation of the significance of an Olympic Games has been centrally shaped by the legacy debate, in a multitude of applications and contexts. Particular aspects of legacy are focused upon, with reference to new studies, from city impacts to volunteers and workers, spatial politics and communities to gender discourse, and protest and publics. The article is flavoured by a running commentary on legacy claims by academics, politicians and IOC careerists concerning the London 2012 Summer Olympics, and considers the bidding rhetoric of cities beyond Rio de Janeiro 2016, through to Tokyo 2020. In conclusion, it is argued that despite the embeddedness of the legacy idea in Olympic discourse, the reality is that legacy will prove elusive without long-term planning before Olympic events, and remain unproven without systematic post-event research over realistically extended periods. Critical social science remains essential to such an understanding of the gap between legacy claims and the realities of the recurring Olympic narratives.

Introduction

Creating sustainable legacies is a fundamental commitment of the Olympic Movement. Every city that hosts the Olympic Games becomes a temporary steward of the Olympic Movement. It is a great responsibility. It is also a great opportunity. Host cities capture worldwide attention. Each has a once-in-a-lifetime chance to showcase the celebration of the human spirit. And each creates a unique set of environmental, social and economic legacies that can change a community, a region, and a nation forever. (Jacques Rogge, IOC president; IOC, 2013, p. 1)

Part of the Olympic industry is the knowledge-production that attaches to getting, staging and evaluating the event.¹ When a city wins the right to stage the Games, consultants and specialists build careers on it; analysts offer advice, perspectives and models for monitoring the impact of the Games; pundits and commentators interpret trends and trajectories; and universities with subject-based claims to expertise, or through mere geographical serendipity, lay claim to particular skills of commentary and evaluation. In one English university, for instance, a pro-vice chancellor for research could open a British Council symposium with the claim that barely any other university in the UK was as equipped as his to stage an event that would enable us to truly understand the importance and effects of an Olympic Games – he could parade his historians, sociologists, economists, exercise scientists, educationalists, political scientists, sport studies stars and lay claim to a critical mass of specialists whose interdisciplinary potential made them a unique team for illuminating the forthcoming event – London’s third hosting of the modern (Summer) Olympic Games. At the symposium were also people who would be doing the same thing in Brazilian cities four years on, as knowledge-brokers, consultants and academics played their own international game of baton-passing, or torch-carrying, from one high-profile Olympic city to another. And one word has come to bind all this multifarious activity together – legacy: we all want to know or create or learn a formula for understanding and so ensuring Olympic legacy. Not impact, not effects, not outcomes, but legacy. In this article I explore different – some widely recognised, some contested, some previously ignored – dimensions of legacy, and the legacy debate; but first, to the term itself within Olympic history and discourse.

Locating the legacy discourse

Trawling the database of International Olympic Committee (IOC) minutes up to the mid-1980s, there is no trace of any concern with legacy; the priority for the IOC throughout the 1968–1980 Summer Games ‘M’ crises – Mexico, Munich, Montreal and Moscow placing human rights issues, terrorism, long-term debt and political boycotts firmly on the Olympic agenda – was mere survival. The first mention of the term in an IOC minute may well be in the address by Frank King, chairman of the Organising Committee of the 15th Winter Olympics at Calgary, Canada, 1988, at the IOC meeting on 25 and 26 July 1984 in Los Angeles, on the eve of the Summer Olympics. The context was hardly celebratory, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s boycott of the Games, along with many of its satellite states. ‘Our Financial Plan is unfolding as it should. Our objectives are to provide the greatest possible participation to athletes, officials and spectators and to leave a legacy of Olympic facilities fully paid for’ (IOC, 1984, Annex 9, p. 53). This was a sober and cautious statement from King, matching in tone what the minute describes as a ‘solemn opening’ of the session the previous day, when the theme had stressed the need in an imperfect world for ‘a strong social force to bridge gaps and to bring people together’. But there it is, the couplet that now dominates Olympic bidding and planning discourse: participation and legacy. ‘Come Together’ was the slogan of the Calgary organisers, and the boycotted LA Games was an intriguing Cold War setting in which to articulate a collective aspiration. Gold and Gold (2011) have shown how some senses of legacy began to inform the official reports of Olympics from the mid-century, so that the report on Melbourne 1956 talked of a ‘continuing asset’, Rome 1960 of ‘meeting ever-increasing needs’, and organisers of Montreal 1976 wrote of their aim to establish an ‘inheritance of benefit’ (Gold & Gold, 2011, p. 4). The mayor of Melbourne stated in the bid document that his city would commit to ‘establish, as a legacy of the XVI Olympiad, an Athletic Centre perpetuating in Australia the high ideals in Amateur Sport and for which that movement stands’ (Leopkey & Parent, 2012a, pp. 927–928); this was an isolated case of the term, a specific, facility-based pledge. But the Calgary statement set a benchmark, and LA’s official report took up the theme, with the Canadian Winter Games host city echoing its own legacy concerns and principles in its 1988 official report. Calgary’s Frank King, telling the story of his city’s success in staging what the IOC president Samaranch called ‘the best Olympic Winter Games ever organised’, was to turn the legacy principle into a gushing reciprocal tribute:

The spirit of Calgary will become part of the new Olympic spirit and the next Games will benefit from that … The living legacy of the Calgary Winter Games will grow from the feeling of true friendship that thousands of workers and Olympic athletes contributed to a world that hungers for harmony. At the end of the day they knew that their dream had come true. (King, 1991, p. 327)

Developed as a principle to justify the Olympic phenomenon at a time of crisis and survival, ‘legacy’ was soon turned into a rhetorical tool that could be used in an encomium to the Olympic movement and its stated ideals of peace and international understanding. From the early 1990s, the IOC focused on environmental protection as primary theme and concern, and in its 1999 Agenda 21 for the Olympic Movement introduced the terms ‘sustainable development’ and ‘legacy’ into its Charter (Chappelet & Kübler-Mabbott, 2008, p. 180). In future Games, the escalating and consistently uncontrollable costs of its staging would be increasingly rationalised by the appeal to legacy, in realms from the economic to the environmental, participation to regeneration, diplomacy to public health, national pride to global harmony.

It was in November 2002 that the term became formally adopted in IOC self-framing documents, when the Olympic Charter, on the basis of the recommendation of an IOC study commission, was amended ‘to emphasise the importance of “promoting a possible legacy from the Olympic Games to the host city and the host country”’ (Weed, 2013, p. 87). Those cities battling to win the bid for the 2012 Summer Games, building up to the decision in Singapore in July 2005 to award the Games to London in a 54–50 vote final run-off against Paris, were therefore the first bidders formally to be invited to place legacy concerns at the heart of their bid.

The IOC (2013, p. 56) claims that ‘with a potential global audience of billions, the Olympic Games … have grown in popularity and expanded in reach’, and ‘their economic importance has increased too’. Positive examples are listed in this legacy brochure of increased levels of economic activity and production, or increases in Gross Domestic Product; of boosts to tourism numbers and of incalculable improvements in a city’s image. Unsurprisingly, the IOC statement is highly selective in its examples, with little regard for the widespread recognition that ‘mega-sporting events are extremely liable to less-than-accurate sporting impact studies’ that ‘may overstate benefits, understate costs and misuse multipliers’ (Barclay, 2009, p. 66).²

John MacAloon (2006, p. 25) reminds us that Games ‘are intercultural on a massive scale’, and that different models of the festive and the spectacular ‘bump into one another in enlightening, creative, and sometimes destructive ways’. In this complex mix of cultural, economic, political and social elements, there is no routine formula for the modelling and implementation of legacy. MacAloon has provided ‘a partial ethnography of legacy speech in Olympic circles … of talk about what the Olympic Games bring and leave behind’ and links this to the ‘penetration of managerial rationality into Olympic affairs’ (2008, p. 2061). He shows the shift from a concern with ‘brand’ to a preoccupation with ‘legacy’, stating that ‘the magical properties of legacy discourse’ have attained ‘in a very short time a cross-functional, cross-contextual, transnational hegemony denied even to Olympic brand speech in its heyday’ (p. 2061). MacAloon observes that legacy is a desirable ‘discursive object’: ‘Speaking just of Olympic Games legacy, who could be against commitment to and careful planning for how to leave something good and reasonably long-lasting behind for both the local community and the international Olympic Family?’ (p. 2065). He demonstrates, though, in what he calls an ethnographic vignette, how diluted this discursive object can become, in the parlance and rhetoric of stakeholders.

Macrury writes of the tension and potential within the notion of legacy between its connection to a sense of gift exchanges, and its link to essentially commodity-based profits and projections. He argues for a sensitivity towards ‘the “mixed economies” of commodity and gift’ (2008, p. 210) in thinking about the legacies of London 2012. An associated argument, by Macrury and Poynter (2008), is that cost–benefit analysis as an exclusive paradigm will undermine any aspirations to generate any dynamic socio-economic and cultural legacy from London 2012.

London after the party: hailing the legacy

In the London 2012 bid, much was made of the intent to provide facilities that would contribute to projects of regeneration and plans for increased participation (Tomlinson, 2014, p. 240). Such statements of intent have become routine, though they are vulnerable to political vicissitudes and economic volatility at national and global levels. Weed (2013, p. 97) observes, of the build-up to the London Games, that ‘both legacy initiatives and success indicators’ were ‘changed, dropped or rebranded in the final two years before the Games’. In this light, we pause here a moment to look at London’s Olympic Park 18 months after the event.

In early March 2014 the London Aquatics Centre, stripped back after the removal of seats, and flooded with light that had been blocked by packed tiers in the glory days of July and August 2012, opened to the general public (Doward, 2014). The deputy manager of the not-for-profit organisation running the facility, Peter Bundy of GLL Sport Foundation, hailed it as ‘the standout venue’, with ‘a feel of a cathedral about it. It’s currently the best swimming pool in the world’ (Doward, 2014, p. 3). Behind this sort of unsubstantiated hyperbole the stakes were high, given the commitment to community benefits in the London 2012 bid. The Copper Box, where handball had drawn the crowds in 2012, was already up and running as a multi-use sports and entertainment space, open since July 2013. Following on from the London Aquatics Centre launch, the Lee Valley VeloPark was due to open to the public in late March, and a May opening was planned for the Lee Valley Hockey and Tennis Centre, for both community and elite use. Legal wrangles over the big one – the Olympic Stadium itself – looked to have been resolved with the football club West Ham United (at the time of the writing looking like it would survive in England’s Premie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword: Bottling the Olympic Spirit
• 1. Olympic legacies: recurrent rhetoric and harsh realities
• 2. The Beijing Olympics: complicit consumerism and the re-invention of citizenship
• 3. The legacies of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games: a bitter–sweet burden
• 4. Making the Olympics work: interpreting diversity and inclusivity in employment and skills development pre-London 2012
• 5. Training of Vancouver 2010 volunteers: a legacy opportunity?
• 6. Landscapes of London 2012: ‘adiZones’ and the production of (corporate) Olympic space
• 7. Legacies of 2012: putting women’s boxing into discourse
• 8. London’s shadow legacies: security and activism at the 2012 Olympics
• 9. The 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games and Brazil’s soft power
• Index