Anti-Olympics protests
The Olympic and Paralympic Games are eagerly awaited by people around the world: the chance to see elite athletes performing at their best, and the spectacle of the ceremonies themselves has huge appeal. However, there have often been protests against the modern Games in many of the host cities, generated by both local and international pressure groups. Aided by the Internet, and fuelled by the global recession, ideas about the ethics of mega events have gained increased currency.
A distinction is made on these pages between political protests such as the terrorist attack on the Israeli Olympic team in 1972 and the Black Power protest in Mexico 1968 – both of which used the Games as a platform for external causes - and opposition to the concept of the Games themselves.
One of the principal planks in the anti-Olympics platform derives from the anti-globalisation movement, which sees the corporate nature of the Games – in the form of the IOC and its global sponsors - as elitist and fundamentally flawed. Opposition to the Games ethos has also been manifested by host city pressure groups, including environmentalists, human rights activists and anti-poverty coalitions. Some of the websites of such groups in Australia and the United Kingdom have been archived by web archiving projects in Australia (Pandora) and Great Britain (UKWAC). A selection of sites are listed below:
From the Pandora archive
People Ingeniously Subverting the Sydney Olympics farce
From the UKWAC archive
Elsewhere on the Web
International network against the Games and commercial sports
In Academia
A number of Olympic scholars, such as Helen Lenskyj, question the assumptions behind the official Olympic discourse, and other researchers comment on the ethics of the contracts signed between the IOC and the host cities, especially with regard to the legal stipulations involved in the holding of an Olympic Games, and the rights of its sponsors. The bibliography below lists some of the key resources, while our contributor Jennifer Jones, a Ph.D researcher at the University of the West of Scotland argues her point of view (see research articles opposite).
Bibliography
Giulianotti, R ‘Human rights, globalization and sentimental education: the case of sport’ in Sport in society 7, (3) 355-69
London reference collections shelfmark: ZC.9.a.7405
Lending collections shelfmark: 8419.655000
Lenskyj, Helen Inside the Olympic industry: power, politics, and activism
Albany: State University of New York Press, c2000.
London reference collections shelfmark: YC.2002.a.7675
Lending collections shelfmark: m00/37494
Lenskyj, Helen Olympic industry resistance: challenging Olympic power and propaganda
Albany: State University of New York Press, c2008.
London reference collections shelfmark: YK.2009.a.21648
Lending collections shelfmark: m08/.26382
Warmsley, K ‘Laying Olympism to rest’ in ‘Post-Olympism?: questioning sport in the twenty-first century edited by by John Bale & Mette Krogh Christensen
Oxford: Berg, 2004..
London reference collections shelfmark: YC.2009.a.8822
Lending collections shelfmark: m06/.14108
Shaw, Christopher A. Five ring circus: myths and realities of the Olympic Games
Philadelphia, Pa.: New Society, c2008.
London reference collections shelfmark: YK.2009.a.1132
Lending collections shelfmark: m08/.25042
Hoberman, John M. The Olympic crisis: sport, politics and the moral order
New Rochele, N.Y.: A.D. Caratzas, 1986.
London reference collections shelfmark: YA.1990.b.5638
Lending collections shelfmark: 86/22836
Olympic Games, mega-events and civil societies: globalization, environment, resistance edited by Graeme Hayes & John Karamichas
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Lending collections shelfmark: m12/.10082
