Why the Olympics Aren’t Good for Us, and How They Can Be

Mark Perryman reminds us there’s much to critique in the modern Games.

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From Why the Olympics Aren’t Good for Us, and How They Can Be:

“Each Olympic Games is indivisible from the political, economic, social and cultural forces that shape it. The Olympics change as the world changes…

“In many ways the current era in Olympic history began at the Los Angeles Games in 1984. Four years previously the USA had failed to persuade most of the world to join it in boycotting the 1980 Moscow Games… Prior to that in 1976 the Montreal Games had been a huge loss-making commercial disaster for the city, and 1972’s Munich Games had been marked by terrorism. Something had to change if the Olympics were to survive. The early 1980s was the era of Reaganomics, and California was US President Reagan’s home state. What better place than Los Angeles to put the stamp of corporate America on the Five Rings and transform a symbol that was fast becoming damaged goods?

”This was the first Games where the profit motive was paramount. Sponsorship, endorsement, and product-placement deals were all signed with the global multinationals. Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Mars Bar were the kind of brands that could provide the huge sums demanded. For such global products the Olympics provided the perfect promotional platform. This commodification of the Games inevitably had an impact on the athletes too. They demanded, with some degree of justification, that as their sporting efforts now sustained a highly profitable enterprise for a self-perpetuationg International Olympic Committee (IOC), they should have a share of the spoils. In 1986, two years after Los Angeles, the strict Olympian code of amateurism was summarily abandoned… Both processes, commericializaiton fo the Games and professionalization of the athletes, have been key to the dramatic trnasformation of the Olympics into what they are today.”

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Further Reading

Why the Olympics Aren’t Good for Us, and How they Can Be Mark Perryman On the eve of the summer Olympics, sports activist and commentator Mark Perryman presents a sharply critical take on the way the Games have been organized and an imaginative blueprint for how they could be improved. More

WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE Against the Sharing Economy Tom Slee In What’s Yours Is Mine, Tom Slee argues that the new wave of companies known as the sharing economy, including tech giants Lyft, Airbnb, Taskrabbit, and Uber, is funded and steered by very old-school venture capitalists. More

THE GULF High Culture/Hard Labor Edited by Andrew Ross for Gulf Labor Collected in The Gulf is the work of the Gulf Labor Coalition, a group of writers and artists who have been pressuring Saadiyat Island’s Western cultural brands—including the Louvre, the Guggenheim, the British Museum and New York University—to ensure worker protections. More