ABSTRACT
Competition is almost as natural a part of staging the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games as it is intrinsic to the sporting events themselves. The 23 cities that have hosted the Summer Games since the quadrennial olympiads were reintroduced in 1896 form a chronological sequence within which comparisons are inevitable. Which was the best Games ever? Which offered the most appealing spectacle? Which supplied the benchmarks for efficient organisation, for imaginative planning or for greatest benefits for the hosts? Which supplied the paradigms for financial disaster, nationalistic excess or over-commercialism? The answers to these questions are not purely academic. Quite apart from any formal transfer of knowledge procedures, any new hosts will scrutinise the experience of predecessors to locate examples of good practice that they might emulate or surpass. By the same token, prospective applicant cities will look for whatever pointers they can find to help them in the fierce and never-ending competition to gain the nomination to stage an Olympic Games. To elaborate, most of the world’s major cities, at one point or other in their recent histories, will have toyed with the idea of staging the Olympic Games. At one time, of course, this was an untaxing task. The epigram above is taken from the Host City questionnaire developed in the 1950s (IOC, 1957) and poses a question that could probably be answered with a single word. It was one of 14 such questions, which covered the sports to be accommodated, their timing, facilities, Olympic village, construction plans, legal framework, finance, accommodation for the Olympic family and visitors, the organisational skills and experience which the city had of large-scale events, the fine arts programme and guarantees that the Games would be well run. There was an opportunity for cities to say why they should be considered as a site for the Olympic Games (ibid.: 12). In the questionnaire’s preamble, applicants were warned: ‘Invitations must have the approval of the Government of the country in which the city is located in order to ensure its cooperation in staging the
Games successfully.’ Furthermore, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) pointed out that there should be no political demonstrations in any of the Olympic facilities during the Games and that the Games should be used for no purpose ‘other than the advancement of the Olympic Movement’ (ibid.: 9). Cities contemplating applying for the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games at the present time face a process that is worlds away from that of the early Games, when the business of bidding was traditionally shaped by the IOC’s concerns with the promotion of sport, education and culture and the ways in which these were expressed through the movement itself and the philosophy of Olympism. Detailed discussion of the subsequent transformation of this gentle exercise into the laborious inquisition of the present day lies beyond the scope of this chapter (Booth, 2005; Theodoraki, 2007). Nevertheless, the changes that have been seen reflect far more than just the confrontation between a nostalgically framed festival and the harsh commercial environment of the early twenty-first century. In the first place, there are new forms of partnership between the IOC and the Host Cities, in which the former accepts that the latter will use the Games as a vehicle for advancing its own agendas. Second, the IOC has accepted the need for greater rigour and transparency in its dealings with the Host Cities – a development made compellingly necessary after the bribery scandal over the 2002 Winter Games at Salt Lake City. Third, the climate of opinion changes and new issues constantly rise to the fore. In the 1990s, for example, the IOC responded to society’s environmental concerns and, arguably, accusations about the gigantism of the Games by adding ‘environment’ to its core philosophy of Olympism alongside sport and culture. From this point onwards, notions of sustainability and environmental auditing were added to the candidature procedures. The net result is that potential hosts are subjected to a lengthy and arduous process of international scrutiny in which they are vetted to ensure that they are capable of delivering a huge, complex and extremely costly multi-sport festival. They do so at (their own) considerable expense. The US$59.4 million that the Chicago team spent on its abortive 42-month campaign to gain the nomination for the 2016 Summer Games is a case in point (Rogers, 2010). Nevertheless, in recent decades at least, there has still been no shortage of willing volunteers to stage the Games and to mount elaborate campaigns to persuade the IOC and other local and national constituencies that their candidacy is the one to support. Moreover, prospective applicants are willing to make their commitment years in advance. They may well recognise that they need time to convince local interests that some or all of the potential advantages can be realised and to gain adequate support, nationally and internationally. They might also recognise that their cities are unlikely to be successful at the first attempt and thus may make an initial bid primarily to gain experience and make valuable contacts. In approaching this matter, they will be able to select the point at which they wish to enter the fray with some confidence. The timetable is well-known; indeed, there are few more stable aspects of cultural history than the Olympic calendar – not even the minor inconvenience of world wars has been allowed to disrupt calculation of the four-year Olympiads. It is possible, therefore, to decide not to bid for the next available Games but one scheduled for a more distant date. In 2011, for example, no less than eight cities (Amsterdam, Brisbane, Melbourne, Nairobi, Rotterdam, Seattle, Thessaloniki and Vancouver) had already expressed interest in bidding for the Games of the XXXIV Olympiad in 2028 – for which the Host City will not be chosen until 2021. The nature and ferocity of the resulting competition for the Games speaks volumes about the perceived benefits, for the Olympic Games have become a development project which provides for a wide range of agendas that can be tailored to the specific needs of almost any large city. There is the allure of being an ‘Olympic city’; a member of a prestigious club whose members have received the accolade from the IOC that infers confidence in the quality, competence and
creativity of their cities. Increasingly, too, the Games are seen as offering an unparalleled opportunity to develop and expedite projects that might otherwise have taken decades to initiate. The nature of the benefits are now embraced within the holistic concept of ‘legacy’, which incorporates the short-and long-term outcomes of the many tangible and intangible factors encompassed by Olympic event planning and implementation. These might include strengthening the urban economy, promoting regeneration of rundown districts, revamping transport and service infrastructures, encouraging the construction of landmark buildings for culture and sport, inculcating an enhanced skills base, permanently repositioning the city more favourably in the global tourist market, creating vibrant cultural quarters, and establishing a network of high-grade facilities to serve as the basis for future bids. Yet perhaps the most eagerly sought and most elusive benefits stem less from establishing new facilities on the ground than from opportunities for place promotion – the conscious use of publicity and marketing to communicate selective images of towns and regions to a target audience (Gold and Ward, 1994: 2) – or its more focused incarnations as ‘city marketing’ (Ashworth and Voogd, 1990) or ‘re-branding’ (Kavaratzis, 2004). In a world where large cities actively compete for recognition and status, the prestige of the Olympic Games and the sustained attention that they attract provides unparalleled opportunities to make a statement on the world stage. While even constructing a serious bid shows that a city is ambitious for global attention (Ward, 2011), capturing the Games allows municipal authorities to undertake long-term activities designed to boost or alter the image of their cities. Nevertheless, changing a city’s image in the outside world is far more difficult than, say, the rebranding of a commercial product and the perceived excellence of the Olympic ‘brand’ as the summit of sporting achievement often fails to rub off on the city that stages the Games. History reveals numerous occasions on which inadequate planning, poor stadium design, the withdrawal of sponsors, political boycotts, heavy cost overruns on facilities, the forced eviction of residents living in areas wanted for Olympic facilities, and subsequent unwanted stadia leave a legacy that tarnishes rather than enhances the reputation of the Host City (Gold and Gold, 2008). Seen against this background, this chapter explores the way in which processes of negotiation and contestation have shaped the plans of the last three cities to have emerged victorious in the battle to become Summer Olympic cities. In doing so, we seek to complement the more specific analyses of London’s bid found in Part 1 of this volume by placing the 2012 Games in the context of a ceaseless, but not unchanging, process that continues to throw up Host Cities every four years. As such, we consider the shaping of the plans for Beijing, London and Rio de Janeiro (see Tables 21.1 and 21.2 for chronologies and brief analyses of the major aspects of strategy). These bids operate on two levels: the first is tackling the very real but quite different social, economic and planning challenges in the three cities; the other is addressing their global positioning in the media, business and political arenas. We begin by considering Beijing 2008, the growing capital of the world’s most populous state and an emerging economic superpower, where candidacy for the Games supplied the city and state with an opportunity to proclaim their place in the world, but at the same time provided the opportunity to address longstanding planning challenges for the city itself. In the process, the Beijing organisers crafted a festival that may well represent the high-water mark for lavish spectacle for many Olympiads to come. The second section offers brief observations on London 2012, highlighting sources of continuity and divergence that link London back to Beijing and forward to Rio de Janeiro, the subject of the third section of this chapter. Here, we consider the aspirations of Rio’s promoters and the way that they sought to promote a coherent image of their city to the international community, while tackling the social, economic and infrastructural problems that have bedevilled the city for decades.
