Olympic Games

From Chinese Brand Culture to Global Brands uses a Chinese
perspective to examine the capacity of Chinese brand culture to
serve as a complement to existing models of brand globalization.
Moving away from the trend to study the managerial aspects of
Western brand building in Chinese contexts, we examine how
Chinese branding efforts express significant aspects of their own
brand culture. Our selection of Jay Chou, the 2008 Beijing Olympics
Opening ceremony, and Shanghai Tang, an aspiring global fashion brand with aesthetic roots in Chinese historical culture, as illustrative cases, is fully consistent with this unwritten and unspoken consensus around exploiting Chinese cultural specificity towards the global development of Chinese brands. Although these three cases may seem “under the radar,” we believe that, together, they provide unique insights into the relation between brands and Chinese culture, and offer intriguing possibilities for thinking about global Chinese brands.

Mega-events such as the Olympic Games are powerful tools for city-branding and urban development, carrying the ability to create lasting physical, political, social, and economic legacies. Waterfront redevelopment has become a primary mechanism for revitalizing urban spaces, especially through brownfield requalification, and the Olympics have not been indifferent to this trend. Several recent editions have engaged in the rehabilitation of urban waterfronts. To analyze common mistakes that may impair the quality of these interventions, we apply a revised version of a binary evaluation tool to nine such Olympic Waterfronts, starting with Barcelona 1992, assessing their contexts, budgets, programs, plans, and environmental integration. The results show that the Olympic Waterfront can drastically change the image of the city, greatly contributing to the perceived success of the event’s legacy and creating new urban centralities. However, the inadequate management in the planning, delive...

Many authors have been used different mathematical models to study the results of the Olympic Games. Some of these studies try to find new ways to establish alternative performance rankings while others evaluate the efficiency of the countries participating to the competition. Some use economics variables as inputs, others, included social aspects but in general, all of them chose the output orientation. In this work we are interested in studying the results of the Winter Olympic Games, held in Vancouver, Canada in 2010. We choose FDH (Free Disposal Hull) model but we decided to use input orientation. We brought into account the number of athletes of each country as input. As outputs, we use the number of gold, silver and bronze medals. The unit of analysis will be all the countries that took part in the games, even though they had not won any medals.

A protokoll, azon belül a sportprotokoll és sportrendezvényszervezés oktatásához készített egyetemi könyv összeállítása jól felépített, egymásra logikusan alapuló részekből tevődik össze, kezdve az ókori  pánhellén játékok bemutatásával az újkori Olimpiák protokoll és rendezvényszervezési szempontú részletes ismertetésén keresztül a hazai rendezésű világversenyek megvalósításásáig vezeti az Olvasót az egyes folyamatok legelemibb lépéseibe és fázisaiba.

В статье анализируются фотографии второй половины XIX в., на
которых представлена связь человеческого тела со спортивными
практиками. Одни фотографии были инструментом для научного
изучения движений тела, другие служили репрезентативным целям
и характеризовали роль спорта в европейской культуре, в частности
как одного из инструментов экспансии европейского образа жизни
на колониальных территориях. Анализ снимков спортсменов
позволил сделать выводы о том, что предпочтение в видах
спорта было также связано с представлениями о соотнесенности
пластических особенностей тела с социальным положением человекав обществе. Автор отмечает неразделимость популяризации
спорта, исследований движения микрочастиц и экспериментов
в области хронофотографии – все эти процессы сформировали
в конце XIX – начале XX в. то представление о движении, которое
было необходимо впоследствии для развития кинематографа. / The article analyzes the photos of the second half of
the 19th century, which present the relationship of
the human body with sports practices. Some photos
were an instrument for the scientific study of body
movements. Others served representative purposes and
characterized the role of sport in European culture,
in particular as one of the tools for the expansion
of the European lifestyle in the colonial territories.
The analysis of pictures of athletes, allowed to
draw conclusions that preference in sports was also
connected with ideas of correlation of plastic features
of a body with social position of the person in society.
The author notes the inseparability of promoting sports,
motion studies of microparticles and experiments in
the field of chronophotography–all of these processes
have formed in the late 19th–early 20th centuries
the vision of the movement, which was necessary
in consequence for the development of cinema.

Under the banner of Olympic-led urban regeneration, municipal authorities of host cities London and Rio respectively have made colossal investments in large-scale infrastructure, security and surveillance technology to demonstrate their city's capacity in the global market. Olympic bid campaigns are underpinned with a range of positive socioeconomic bene ts related to economic prosperity, improved housing provision and revitalised infrastructure (Rojek, 2013). However, evidence shows that the large scale socio-spatial upheavals that come about as a result of hosting the Olympic games have a history of disproportionately a ecting marginalised and vulnerable members of society. As a result, direct and indirect forms of displacement like forced evictions, demolitions and gentri cation of public space have become a bitter legacy of the Olympic games (Silvestre and de Oliveira, 2012). The rhetoric of legacy, competitive cities and insecurity is weaponized to facilitate a 'state of exception' with the aim of restructuring the urban environment and extending the interests of private capital. This paper argues that in an increasingly neoliberal world -characterised by privatisation, deregulation, and market liberation- the Olympic games have evolved over time to enable displacement, social upheaval and increasingly punitive regimes of control. Indeed, the Olympic legacy has become the production of fear and surveillance and the long-term damage to liberty and civic freedoms.

O artigo apresenta as transformações desencadeadas na Barra da Tijuca, bairro da Zona Oeste da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Trata dessas transformações no limite das fronteiras simbólicas do bairro a partir do contexto olímpico, iniciado em 2009, com a cidade do Rio de Janeiro sendo eleita cidade-sede dos Jogos Olímpicos de 2016. O artigo também mostra os impactos dessas intervenções urbanas no cotidiano de moradores locais, aparecendo conflitos que se estabeleceram com o processo de “produção da cidade olímpica”. Por fim, tendo matérias jornalísticas como fonte, procura mostrar os movimentos de planejamento do bairro, aparecendo Associações de Moradores, Câmara Comunitária e Associações Comerciais envolvidas em projetos de benfeitorias na região.

London is 2012 after 1908 and 1948 for the third time the venue of the Olympic Games. The importance of the metropolis for the Olympic Movement does not only derive from the date of their holding but also from their architectonic herit-age. The White City Stadium as the major venue of 1908 is a milestone of Olympic Architecture. Its design was for the first time assigned to functionality. In the need of the postwar period the 1948 tournament was a masterpiece of organizational skill in the first place. The scale for 2012 is the creation of a leg-acy that includes the architecture and its sustainability.

The 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games, held in Rio de Janeiro, reignited public interest and discussion around Paralympic athletes attempting to qualify for, and compete at, the Olympic Games. That Paralympians have sought to compete at the Olympic Games is, however, not new. This paper looks at the largely unrecognised and often underreported history of Paralympians competing at the Olympic Games and addresses why it is that Paralympians may wish to compete at the Olympic Games. To do this we use historical examples, but also look at the contemporary cases of 3 such athletes: Jason Smyth, Alan Fonteles Cardoso and Markus Rehm. The paper also explores whether or not with advances in medical and prosthetic technologies, as well as potentially increased income and funding, we can expect to see more Paralympians attempting to crossover and compete in the Olympic Games in the future. The methodology used is one of qualitative case studies. The research question was: "What can be le...

In 2013, with the city’s 2002 urban renaissance policy seemingly having
reached its limit, Tokyo won its bid to stage the 2020 Olympics. he city plan was modified, with Olympic clusters replacing the
special zones of urban redevelopment. However, the highly selective, centrally concentrated nature of urban renaissance and Olympic infrastructure has created a two-tier city, provoking debate over what
David Harvey calls the spatial fix, i.e. the temporary spatial solutions adopted by capitalists to save their assets from a downward spiral in values. his paper will examine the assumed continuity between the 2000s (urban renaissance) and the 2010s (Olympic development)
and discuss the pertinence of the term spatial fix in Tokyo. It will formulate the idea of a trend fix to debate the uneven development associated with the Olympics.

Nations realising the political and developmental possibilities in hosting a mega sport event is a trend that has been increasing in recent decades. To take one example, Qatar is one of the most prolific nations in bidding and hosting sports events as a means of augmenting the nation’s image. Building on Joseph Nye’s conception of soft power, this paper examines how Qatar deliberately uses sport as a tool for global nation branding to promote their political objectives. We set out by explaining how nations can benefit from hosting these mega events and the underlying rationale for Qatar’s investment in them. We then focus on Athletics and explore the links between the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) and Qatar in relation to the bidding process for the World Athletics Championships. We conclude by arguing why the IAAF 2019 World Athletics Championships in Doha backfired on Qatar’s soft power and nation branding strategy. The athletics championships, which were the last key test ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, has created doubt as to whether nations like Qatar, with a questionable human rights record and extreme climatic challenges; heat, should be allowed to host sport mega events.