People, Place, Enterprise: Proceedings of the first annual conference on Olympic Legacies (original) (raw)
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Are We Making the Most of Olympic Tourism for 2012?
2011
When London first one the right to stage the 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, the city anticipated a major boost to sports tourism based revenue as a result. However, claims of failures to exploit these opportunities have recently been levelled at the Government
This study investigates the impacts of the London 2012 Olympic Games and their related cultural programme on local small creative organisations in East London. It contributes to unpacking the elusive concept of legacy thorough an in-depth analysis of creative organisations’ stories and experiences, combined with an analysis of policy documents and interviews with key informants, over a four-year period (2010-2014). A range of potential impacts of mega-events for creative organisations are identified and systematically discussed. The results highlight a gap between Olympic rhetoric and local reality. Problems include inadequate local consultation, barriers to accessing opportunities and inability to leverage effectively. The study also explores the role of cultural tourism in delivering an Olympic legacy for the local creative industry. It finds that opportunities to showcase deprived – but creative – areas in East London, and foster the development of creative forms of tourism, were missed.
Journal of Sustainable Tourism The 2012 Olympic Ambassadors and sustainable tourism legacy
This paper examines the capacity of the London (2012) Olympic Ambassador volunteer programmes to create a sustainable tourism legacy. It contributes to the literature on event legacies, particularly the role of volunteers promoting tourism in their home destination. Using an exploratory inductive approach, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted, in 2012 and 2013, with managers of all 11 Ambassador volunteer programmes associated with London and the 10 other regional venues that hosted London Olympic and Paralympic Games events. These show that volunteer Ambassadors enhanced tourist experiences during the Games through the Ambassadors’ pride in their home city, enthusiasm and local knowledge. However, although the Ambassador programmes had aspirations to create a sustainable legacy, in the form of a pool of experienced volunteers to support future events and further tourist visits, this was severely constrained by cuts in local government budgets. The Government Olympic Executive provided a coordinating role leading up to the Games, but neither they nor the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games provided practical assistance for legacy development. This was a missed opportunity to channel the enthusiasm of mega-event volunteers into further volunteering to promote tourism.
Ziakas, V., & Boukas, N. (2013, June). Post-Event Leverage and Olympic Legacy: A Strategic Framework for the Development of Sport and Cultural Tourism in Post-Olympic Athens. Presented at the 9th Annual International Conference on Tourism, ATINER, Athens, Greece.
Although the hosting of the 2004 Olympics in Athens constituted a unique opportunity for the diversification and enrichment of Athens’ (and Greece’s) tourism product, the evident lack of coordination between commercial providers and public governing bodies inhibited the development of a joint strategic approach to leverage the Games. However, the successful organization of the Olympics left a valuable intangible and tangible legacy for Athens, enhancing its heritage and tourism infra/superstructure respectively. Given the unrealized aspiration of harnessing the post-Olympic facilities, this study examines the potential of Athens to exploit its Olympic legacy for the joint development of sport and cultural tourism. This attempt seeks to synthesize a common ground for sport and cultural tourism development in Olympic cities by focusing on Olympic tourism in the post-Games period as it relates to the use of Olympic legacy and post-Olympic assets. A qualitative approach was adopted by conducting nine semi-structured interviews with city officials and tourism administrators. Findings reveal the conditions for synergistic development of sport and cultural tourism and the actions required to mobilize the network of actors, resources and assets that can enable Athens to move from its current inertia and implement post-event leveraging. The study argues that it is still not late for Athens to leverage its post-Olympic assets/legacy capitalizing on its unique and rich cultural heritage interwoven with the Olympic Games. Towards this direction, the study sheds light on what and how can be corrected in order to mitigate the sources and consequences of problems, while providing lessons for future Olympic cities. Finally, a strategic framework is suggested for leveraging the Olympic legacy and developing sustainable post-Olympic (sport and cultural) tourism products.
Leisure Studies, 2019
Focusing on the London 2012 Olympic Games, we investigate the impact of mega-sport events’ spatial transformations on visitor mobility, local leisure consumption and resulting small business trade. Olympic territorialisation, we argue, is a highly contentious and vitally important aspect of leisure studies warranting on-going and further examination. Our case study draws on 43 in-depth interviews with local authorities, governmental and non-governmental project actors, and small-local leisure and visitor economy businesses (retail and hospitality) located at the heart of a ‘Host Event Zone’ in Greenwich, London. We supplement and triangulate subjective accounts with a documentary analysis of 35 policy reports, media, and archival material as the basis for our empirical analysis. Our findings reveal a major dichotomy between the ‘rhetoric’ of inclusion and local ‘realities’ of exclusion as security planning and spatial controls served to close off public spaces and local attractions: diverting visitor flows and leisure consumption toward official event sites, away from local businesses. We illustrate how such urban processes effectively render a vibrant business community invisible and visitors immobile to explore local community spaces during the live staging periods. We close with implications for event organisers, managers and policy makers focused on re-configuring the socio-spatial elements of Olympic organisation and re-direct and mobilise visitor economy flows toward more open civic and leisure spaces in the hope of better (re)distributing consumption into host communities.
This working paper will undertake a close analysis of eight of the most recent Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies. The ceremonies examined are: Moscow (1980), Los Angeles (1984), Seoul (1988), Barcelona (1992), Atlanta (1996), Sydney (2000), Athens (2004) and Beijing (2008). The paper will also discuss some of the images that might be presented at the forthcoming Olympic Opening Ceremony on July 27, 2012 when the eyes of the world will be firmly focused on London. The Opening Ceremony of an Olympic Games is an incredibly rich text to examine. The focus of this paper is on the selection of particular stories, people and images by ceremony organisers to tell (and sell) the national story of the host country. The images are meticulously chosen and almost always generate significant media coverage, community discussion and occasionally, robust debate. The stories and images can often say much about the nation-state that has won the rights to stage what is arguably the most highly coveted global event – the Olympic Games.