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Explores how painters and sculptors, photographers and filmmakers, and architects and designers have helped to affect the consciousness of Olympic spectators around the world.

Rather than interpreting the Olympics as primarily a sporting event of international or national significance, this book understands the Games as a civic project for the host city that serves as a catalyst for a variety of urban interests over a period of many years from the bidding phase through the event itself. Traditional Olympic studies have tended to examine the Games from an outsider's perspective or as something experienced through the print media or television. In contrast, the focus presented here is on the dynamics within the host city understood as a community of interacting individuals who encounter the Games in a variety of ways through support, opposition, or even indifference but who have a profound influence on the outcome of the Games as actors and players in the Olympics as a drama. Adopting a symbolic interactionist approach, the book offers a new interpretive model through which to understand the Olympic Games by exploring the relationship between the Games and residents of the host city. Key analytical concepts such as framing, dramaturgy, the public realm, and the symbolic field are introduced and illustrated through empirical research from the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games, and it is shown how social media and shifts in public opinion reflected interaction effects within the city. By filling a clear lacuna in the Olympic Studies canon, this book is important reading for anybody with an interest in the sociology of sport, urban studies, event studies or urban sociology.

A comprehensive portrait of the Summer Olympics fully updated for the 2008 games in Beijing, China. Includes a complete retrospective of the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece, and incorporates updates to all charts and records, as well as fun facts and anecdotes from the most recent Olympics and training.

A comprehensive, state-of-the-art reference collection, bringing together an authoritative and international line-up of scholars to examine key social and political issues related to the Olympics. An essential, 'one-stop' volume for a wide range of academics, students and researchers.

This book explores how cultural policies are reflected in the design, management and promotion of the Olympic Games. Garcia examines the concept and evolution of cultural policies throughout the recent history of the Olympic Games and then specifically evaluates the cultural program of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. She argues that the cultural relevance of a major event is highly dependent on the consistency of the policy choices informing its cultural dimensions, and demonstrates how such events frequently fail to leave long-term cultural legacies, and are often unable to provide an experience that fully engages and represents the host community, due to their over-emphasis on an economic rather than a social and cultural agenda.

This book is largely a collection of the papers presented at the symposium Olympism, Olympic Education and Learning Legacies, organised by the Comité Internationale Pierre de Coubertin (CIPC). It was held during the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games at Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent, United Kingdom. The symposium drew together presenters and audience members from twenty-five nations on four continents to discuss current and future challenges of education and the Olympic Mo.

Global sporting events involve the creation, management and mediation of cultural meanings for consumption by massive media audiences. The apotheosis of this cultural form is the Olympic Games. This challenging and provocative new book explores the Olympic spectacle, from the multi-media bidding process and the branding and imaging of the Games, to security, surveillance and control of the Olympic product across all of its levels. The book argues that the process of commercialization, directed by the IOC itself, has enabled audiences to interpret its traditional objects in non-reverential ways and to develop oppositional interpretations of Olympism. The Olympics have become multi-voiced and many themed, and the spectacle of the contemporary Games raises important questions about institutionalization, the doctrine of individualism, the advance of market capitalism, performance, consumption and the consolidation of global society. With particular focus on the London Games in 2012, the book casts a critical eye over the bidding process, Olympic finance, promises of legacy and development, and the consequences of hosting the Games for the civil rights and liberties of those living in their shadow. Few studies have offered such close scrutiny of the inner workings of Olympism’s political and economic network, and, therefore, this book is indispensible reading for any student or researcher with an interest in the Olympics, sport's multiple impacts, or sporting mega-events. 1 Lording It: London And The Getting Of The Games - Alan Tomlinson - 2 Pierre De Coubertin And The Modern Olympic Ideals: Myth, Evolution, Or Betrayal? - Lincoln Allison 3 The Promise Of Olympism - Graham Mcfee 4 The Olympics As Sovereign Subject Maker - Thomas F. Carter 5 The Technicolor Olympics? Race, Representation And The 2012 London Games - Daniel Burdsey 6 Youth Sport And London’s 2012 Olympic Legacy - Marc Keech 7 Doping And The Olympics: Rights, Responsibilities And Accountabilities (Watching The Athletes) - Barrie Houlihan 8 The Olympic Documentary And The ‘Spirit Of Olympism’ - Ian Mcdonald 9 Torchlight Temptations: Hosting The Olympics And The Global Gaze - David Rowe And Jim Mckay 10 Taste, Ambiguity And The Cultural Olympiad - Shane Collins And Catherine Palmer 11 Sex Watch: Surveying Women’s Sexed And Gendered Bodies At The Olympics - Jayne Caudwell - 12 Children Of A Lesser God: Paralympics And High-Performance Sport - P. David Howe 13 The Olympic Movement, Action Sports, And The Search For Generation Y - Holly Thorpe And Belinda Wheaton 14 Team Gb, The Bards Of Britishness And A Disunited Kingdom - Mark Perryman 15 The View From The Pressbox: Rose-Tinted Spectacle? - Rob Steen 16 Watched By The Games: Surveillance And Security At The Olympics - John Sugden 17 Afterword. ‘No Other Anything …’: The Olympic Games Yesterday And Today - John Sugden And Alan Tomlinson John Sugden is Professor of the Sociology of Sport at the University of Brighton, UK, and has researched and written widely around topics concerned with the politics and sociology of sport. He is Academic Leader of the Sport and Leisure Cultures subject group and Director of Football for Peace, based in Israel. Alan Tomlinson is Professor of Leisure Studies at the University of Brighton, UK. He is Deputy Chair of the University Research Degrees Committee and Head of Research in the Chelsea School, teaching predominantly in the social history of sport, the sociology of leisure and cultural studies.