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Whose Accolades? An Alternative Perspective on Motivations for Hosting the Olympics

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Abstract

This article argues that much of the literature on Olympic cities misperceives the role played by a city’s business and political elites due to the failure to take into account the historical and socioeconomic circumstances of the country concerned. The article demonstrates that the Chinese Communist Party used the Olympics as a vehicle to consolidate its legitimacy and Beijing as a showpiece to project the country’s identity and modernity internationally. The emphasis here is the interests of the Party and not urban entrepreneurialism. The essential contribution of this article is to propose a matrix as a tool for exploring the motivations of cities and countries for hosting the Olympics. The matrix comprises Olympic cities in democratic and authoritarian, and in developed and developing, countries.

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Notes

  1. http://archives.cnn.com/2000/STYLE/design/08/24/china.theater.ap/

  2. http://www.archiplanet.org/wiki/National_Center_for_the_Performing_Arts,_Beijing,_China#Discussion

  3. The CITIC consortium comprises the CITIC Group, the Beijing Urban Construction Group, the Golden State Holding Group of the United States, and the CITIC Group affiliate Guoan Elstrong.

  4. In addition, the balance of the funding comes from the IOC’s Olympic Partners ‘worldwide sponsorship programme and the IOC official supplier and licencing programme. BOCOG’s income comes from domestic sponsorship, ticketing and licensing programmes within the host country, under the direction of the IOC’ (IOC 2008, 5).

  5. http://www.chncpa.org/n457779/n457899/n458439/n458756/index.html

  6. www.GamesBids.com/archives/2008/Beijing.htm

  7. Email communication from John Logan, 16 May 2008.

  8. A Google Scholar search for material on the Istanbul bid highlighted the Cape Town and Beijing bids and did not provide material that pertained directly to Istanbul.

  9. Qiang Xiao speaking on the panel, ‘Covering China—The Battle for the Story’, of the Fourth Annual China Symposium, ‘Defining Chinese Modernity: Information, Economy and the Environment’, April 25, 2008. Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.

  10. Guoqi also includes the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

  11. Comment by Thomas Bassett on the paper.

  12. Course paper by Ashwin Prabhu.

  13. Assuming an exchange rate of R7 = $1.

  14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Winter_Olympics

  15. Comment by Thomas Bassett on the paper.

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Acknowledgements

This paper emerged from a course I taught at Columbia University on ‘Mega-events and urban development’ and benefitted from class discussion. I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Orli Bass, Thomas Bassett, Robert Beauregard, Susan Fainstein, Briavel Holcomb and Peter Marcuse in clarifying and sharpening the positions advanced in this paper; which is not to say that they agree with all the points.

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  1. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Richard Tomlinson

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Tomlinson, R. Whose Accolades? An Alternative Perspective on Motivations for Hosting the Olympics. Urban Forum 21, 139–152 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-010-9082-9

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