Written by When one thinks of what culture in sports means or what is captured in this phrase, there is an excellent chance it is the Olympic Games that they think about. The Games are the largest regularly occurring cultural festival in the world, the greatest coming together of people from different nations and cultures. It is hardly an accident that sport is the focus of such a gathering. Sport remains one of the key cross-cultural connectors we have in the world. And while the Olympic Games stopped giving medals for painting, sculpture, musical composition, literature and poetry in 1952, focusing exclusively on athletic competition, the cultural significance of the Games has only increased in the ensuing half century. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-the-olympics-gave-out-medals-for-art-6878965/
No statistic better demonstrates the universality of sport than, that in a global pandemic year, 206 different National Olympic Committees (including one for political refuges) sent delegations to compete in Tokyo, in the delayed Games of the 32nd Modern Olympiad. By contrast, there are only 193 Nation States in the United Nations. That the IOC membership is larger and more inclusive than that of the UN says everything about the basic human need to take part, to compete, and to ideally come away enriched by the experience of sport.
For a group and an educational site like this one, called Culture in Sports (www.CultureinSports.com), dedicated to advancing cultural understanding, ethical behavior, and education, in and through sport, the Olympics represent the most watched, easiest to reference, and simply the most teachable moments for us to share. In other words, the Olympics are the whole enchilada of how sports meets culture, how cultural influences sport, how sports are a bridge for increased understanding between people from different cultures, and how sports both show the best of us and can reveals the worst in us.
The 2020 Tokyo Olympics are underway, a year later than planned and without fans in attendance. Public health experts can debate whether they should have gone off at all. What’s not up for debate is that many of the objectives that Tokyo’s Olympic Organizing Committee likely sought to deliver when the city was picked as the host for the 2020 Games back in 2013 are likely unreachable now against a global pandemic. Hosting an Olympic Games seldom delivers direct profit to a host, the 1984 Los Angeles Games being the notable exception. Host city contracts are now written to shift much of the risk, cost, and burden associated with the Games away from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and onto the host city.
Instead of profit, most Olympic hosts seek to gain either a long-term legacy or a return on objective. Barcelona, which hosted the 1992 Olympics, often regarded as the best organized Games in the 125-year history of the Modern Olympics, made significant investments in re-opening the city to the Mediterranean and building a tourism infrastructure that would lead Barcelona to be one of the most visited cities in the world for much of the next two decades. London, the 2012 host, sought even more circumspect outcomes, physically renewing the long dormant and industrial Eastern part of the city and dramatically reshaping London’s stodgy international image as a good place for an IPO but not a capital of ICE- defining principles that leading global cities of the 21st Century are built- intelligence, culture, and entertainment.
What is left for Tokyo, the IOC and the athletes now, is what happens within the competition venues. Can the athletes of the world lift the rest of us up on their shoulders and show us what culture in sports means.