Anti-Olympic Campaigns

In the contemporary world of globalised sports and extreme commercialisation the most prominent of all sporting events, the Olympic Games, have become the centre of sceptical and critical attention over recent years. An emerging anti-Olympic movement has spread around the planet, wherever the Olympics are being proposed or held, questioning the benefits and citing the harmful impact of the Games. On the eve of the London 2012 Games, amidst a global economic crisis and a growing gap between rich and the poor in many countries, the Olympics seem to have failed to meet the demands of our time. With constantly rising demands on financial, human and natural resources, the Olympics continue to consume voraciously in a world of austerity. Also, their governing body, the IOC, with its aristocratic constitution and ambiguous agenda, provokes opposition both with its authoritarianism toward hosting countries, and its ambiguous political decisions. For these reasons and many others the Olympic Games are now, more than ever before, being overtly challenged by activist groups and academics. Those who have registered that dissent, most notably Simson and Jennings, Lenskyj, and Shaw, have succeeded largely in revealing the true nature of the Olympics, exposing the IOC and charting the growth of a quite significant social movement.1 Their pioneering work has set the study of the Olympics at a new level and in the process contributed to our understanding of the relationship between mega sports events and the wider society. But they have also raised more questions about the role of the Games and the nature of the opposition to them.