The Olympics is starting to loom large on the horizon, the first Olympics in the post-GFC world, where the cashed up London that won the bid to host the games in 2012 is a far cry from the one that will host the Games.
Starting with the Atlanta games in 1996, the Olympics have become a “better than the Joneses” competition, culminating with the amazing, no expense spared, Beijing games.
However, the global financial crisis has people the world over counting the pennies for everything, and there is growing concern in the UK that the Olympics are going to be an enormous financial disaster.
Australia’s hands are somewhat bloody in all of this. Sydney 2000 was a grand announcement of Australia’s presence in the modern world, with much fanfare and spectacle, and was crowned “the Greatest Olympics ever”.
The reality was that Australian borrowed up big, and on the back of the income generated, covered the cost. There is nothing wrong with this; in fact it’s very smart.
The problem was that the Sydney games out-did the Atlanta games by so much, and was so impressive that a standard was set on how much the games should “get better” with each Olympiad.
Greece is still reeling from the Olympics’ “homecoming” in 2004, and the Chinese budget for 2008 was infinite. With so much National pride now attached to the Olympics, how can London be seen to be a step down from Beijing, Athens or even Sydney?
The debate is already starting with regards how the Olympics can be “improved” for the future, ensuring its survival and place in the landscape for evermore. However there is something important that needs to be remembered. There are only two sporting events that bring the whole world together; the Football World Cup and the Olympics, and they couldn’t be more different.
Football is the single most commonly played game in the world, and the World Cup is a two year process involving more countries than the UN to determine the very best. It is a celebration of the world’s focus on a single goal.
The Olympics on the other hand, is a different animal all together. It is a celebration of diversity and competition, with a range of events that embrace this ethos. The appeal of the Olympics is the package nature of the event. People are exposed to new and exotic events on top of the staple “blue ribbon” events.
As we look at ways to make the Olympics more “sustainable” for the future, we need to remember what it is that makes it great.
Hacking away events that are deemed to be “too small” or “too obscure” actually hacks away from the Olympic spirit. At the end of the day, all gold medals are equal, and it takes just as much drive and commitment to win the Men’s 100m sprint gold as it does to win the Women’s Fencing gold. This is the essence of what makes the Olympics great.
In most cases – but not all – the Olympics is the pinnacle of a sport, to win gold is the highest point that you can reach.
The biggest area that the Olympics can improve is by assessing the role that it plays in the calendar of each Olympic sport.
Boxing is a great example of where the Olympics have a massive role to play in the sport. Olympic boxing is an amateur sport, and seen as a real honour to win the gold, particularly given the way that professional boxing is structured nowadays. Perhaps a structure like this could be appealing to a sport such as tennis.
Another option would be to negotiate with the governing bodies of sports (such as basketball, baseball and hockey) to combine the World Championships and Olympic Games into a single event. This would require a lot of give and take on both sides, but could have far reaching rewards.
An area that FIFA have been quite keen on in recent times has been the legacy that a World Cup leaves. The USA, Japan/Korea and South African world cups have all been about leaving infrastructure and motivational legacies for the future. Unfortunately this is one are that the Olympics cannot compete. The Olympics is more than the some of its parts, facilities will (and do) struggle to meet ongoing maintenance costs in the way that rectangular football stadia can.
The future of the bidding process should consider this issue more closely, identifying locations where the infrastructure exists, inviting those countries to consider bidding. The appeal is that it would only require minor upgrades to host the games, as opposed to the full scale industrial expenditure that seems to be the norm.
We need to keep focused on what it is that makes the Olympics great, and one of only two sporting events that can unite the whole world.
It is about more than just a handful of blue ribbon events, and we should be looking for ways to tweak what we currently have, not to make wholesale changes.
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