Vassil Girginov

A sustainable sports legacy: creating a link between the London Olympics and sports participation.

The London 2012 bid was based on the promise to use the Olympic Games to promote sports participation for all groups across the UK. This is the most ambitious project in the history of the Olympic Games in terms of both its scope and level of change, as, in order to be implemented successfully, it has to address not only peoples behaviour but also deeply rooted social structures and relations. This paper addresses the little explored issue of the link between hosting the Olympic Games and sports participation in the host country within the framework of sustainable sports legacy. It takes a process-oriented approach, suggesting that Olympic legacies are constructed and not given, and explores the role of the International Olympic Committee and the UK government in framing sports legacy. The paper draws from relevant literature and two original case studies, and analyses five main processes involved in legacy construction. It is argued that the role of sports participation legacy has been to compensate for the propensities of Olympic growth. The concept of sustainable Olympic sports development legacy is controversial but appealing. It offers grounds for agreement in Olympic aspirations for social progress and equality while still promoting games that are faster, higher, stronger and the best ever. Achieving sustainable sports participation will remain an illusive target until the rights of different communities and sports are recognized.

The political process of constructing a sustainable London Olympics sports development legacy

This study attempts to develop a research agenda for understanding the process of constructing a sustainable Olympic sports development legacy. The research uses a social constructivist perspective to examine the link between the 2012 London Olympic Games and sustainable sports development. The first part of the paper provides justification for the study of sport policy processes using a constructivist lens. This is followed by a section which critically unpacks sustainable sports development drawing on Mosses (1998) ideas of process-oriented research and Searles conceptualisation of the construction of social reality. Searles (1995) concepts of the assignment of function, collective intentionality, collective rules, and human capacity to cope with the environment are considered in relation to the events and discourses emerging from the legacy vision(s) associated with the 2012 London Olympic Games. The paper concludes by proposing a framework for engaging in process-oriented research and highlights key elements, research questions, and methodological issues. The proposed constructivist approach can be used to inform policy, practice, and research on sustainable Olympic sports development legacy.

Governance of the London 2012 Olympic Games legacy.

This study addresses the governance of the London 2012 Olympics legacy. It presents legacy not as a retrospective but a prospective concept concerned with shaping the future through interactions between the state, market and society. This entails designing systems of governance to guide and steer collective actions towards a consensus amongst various parties concerned. Four modes of governance and a range of policy instruments were examined in the delivery of sustainable London Olympics sport legacy including coercive, voluntarism, targeting and framework regulation. The British government actively created a new policy space and promoted institutional conduct consistent with its legacy visions. The current global legacy framework is lacking the governance dimension and its logic needs to be reconsidered. A meaningful sport legacy requires not top-down approaches but locally informed strategies supported by a developmental design of the Olympic Games informed by sustainable principles.

From Participants to Competitors: The Transformation of British Gymnastics and the Role of the Eastern European Model of Sport

Since the first appearance of the former Soviet athletes at the Olympic Games in Helsinki in 1952, commentators have been trying to discover what was behind their phenomenal success. The fact that it was not only the USSR which led the medal tables of major international competitions, but Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the DDR, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia as well, prompted many authors (including Hoberman, Petrova and Riordan) to advance political and ideological explanations and to construct the concept of an Eastern European model of sport. Although these two perspectives provide useful insights into the conceptual grounding, structure and power of the Eastern European model of sport, they largely discount the importance of its cultural dimension. The cultural dimension includes more subtle (a ‘software of the mind’) but complex elements, such as relations between the state, civil society and individual citizens, and personal and social values, norms and ethical principles guiding sporting practice and behaviours. Part of the specificity of the Eastern European model of sport can be attributed to the deeply rooted cultural characteristics of those nations. Some of the foremost authorities in cultural studies, Hofstede and Hickson and Pugh, have defined Eastern Europe as a collectivist culture where the emphasis is on belonging and the ideal is to be a good member. This is in contrast to the highly individualistic British culture, where the emphasis is on getting ahead and the ideal is to be a good leader (Jackson). As several writers (Riordan, Liponski and Girginov) have observed, modern sport was also shaped as a reaction to the West’s attempts to create a cultural and political hegemony. The most powerful and influential Slavonic sport and recreational movement, Falcon (Sokol), was originated by the Czech people as a response to the European gymnastics movement (mainly from Germany and Sweden), and later to British forms of sport.

Volunteer selection and social, human and political capital: a case study of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games

In the case of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, 70,000 volunteers were selected from more than one million applicants and the majority were university students in Beijing (BOCOG, 2008). Drawing upon theories of social, human and political capital, as developed by Bourdieu (1986; 1991), Coleman (1988) and Putnam (2000) respectively, this research analyses how volunteer selection was practised at this mega event. In particular, the role of the three forms of capital in volunteer selection was examined through an analysis of policy documents, interviews with BOCOG staff and focus groups with university students who volunteered for the Olympic Games. This research contributes to the body of knowledge in the field, and also provides insights for practitioners in selecting volunteers for organising mega sport events and other activities that require a large number of volunteers.

Bulgarian Sport Policy 1945–1989: A Strategic Relations Approach

The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games have stimulated discussions about the success of different sport systems, and the Chinese model in particular. Revisiting explanations of sport in the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe during the Cold War seems timely, as the current Chinese model of sport was largely designed after the Soviet example established in this period. This paper examines Bulgarian sport policy between 1945 and 1989. It employs a strategic relation approach to analyse sport policy-making as a strategic relation closely linked to the dominant state project of building a new ‘stateness’. It goes beyond ideological interpretations and argues that the state represents a strategic terrain where these relations have to be established in struggles, the outcomes of which are always uncertain. Furthermore, past and present struggles and their outcomes create various socio-political environments that presuppose the forms of state selectivity and intervention in sport. The process of constructing sport policy was influenced by two main categories of strategic relations: intra-state, including political, organizational and personal relations between the party, state apparatus and various sport and non-sport organizations and their managers; and transnational, concerning ideological, political, economic and organizational relations with both Communist and Western countries and international sport organizations.

The politics of sport sponsorship: A policy network perspective

Sport sponsorship is perceived typically as a transaction within the dyad of sport and commercial organisations. Subsequently, existing research displays preoccupations with the behaviour of the commercial organisations, and neglects the interests of other important actors including mediating agencies, the media and governments. Drawing from the concepts of the modern commodity form and policy networks, this paper argues that sport sponsorship is a social, political and economic mechanism for the transformation of the use value of sport into exchange value by focusing on the things that are exchanged in sponsorship rather than the forms it takes. Using empirical evidence from the Sofia Aerobics Grand Prix 2001 it is contended that it is the exchange that sets the parameters of utility and scarcity, and exchange is the source of value, and that what links value and exchange in sport sponsorship is politics. The underlying processes of the politics of sport sponsorship include, (i) framing aerobics as a commodity to be exchanged in the market place; (ii) forging alliances between voluntary, private and public organisations from which property rights arise, and (iii) allocating resources through political calculations and judgement.

Has the London 2012 Olympic Inspire Programme Inspired a Generation? A Realist View.

The organisers of the 2012 London Olympics have endeavoured explicitly to use the Games to inspire a generation. This is nothing short of putting the main claim of Olympism to the test, but surprisingly the Inspire project has received virtually no scholarly scrutiny. Using an educationally-informed view of inspiration, this paper interrogates the official evaluations of the London 2012 Inspire programme from a realist evaluation perspective and asks what are the theory, mechanisms and outcomes of the programme. It also considers the relationship between evidence, research and policy making in the context of the Olympic Games as an educational project. It is contended that the official evaluations of the Inspire programme failed to provide answers to the key questions of why, how and under what conditions the programme effects have occurred and for whom. In this way they further perpetuate the mythical powers of the Olympics to change young people’s behaviour through sport on the basis of highly problematic evidence.

The political process of constructing a sustainable London Olympics sport legacy: three years on

The paper follows on from an earlier study and addresses our understanding of the construction of Olympic legacy. It poses the question what counts as knowledge and who is responsible for producing it and questions the value of rational, objectively-produced knowledge which continues to dominate the sport legacy policy agenda at the expense of other forms of knowledge.

Eastern European Sport: Nomen

The study of Eastern European society and sport could be put into the category of how we interpret difference. ‘The human attempt to give meaning and order to the world has been called a ‘‘nomos-building activity’’ involving the process of typification which confers knowability and predictability.’ The reality of twenty-first-century Eastern Europe is complex and entangled, and the traditional East-West representation does not serve it well either epistemologically or ontologically. This contribution is an attempt to give meaning to Eastern European sport by understanding its cultural biography interpreted in terms of its scales, temporality, identity and knowledge base. ‘Communist sports policy in Eastern Europe is dead,’ wrote Jim Riordan in 1996, reiterating this in 1999. Despite his well-deserved reputation as a Western authority on Eastern European sport, this judgement was premature and unsubstantiated. In actuality, nothing can be further from the truth. For it contradicts the leading slogan of post-Communist sports policy ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater’, implying incremental rather than revolutionary changes. Riordan’s comment, however, indicates an attempt to open up a new chapter in the cultural biography of sport in Eastern Europe. The end of the era signalled new socio-political arrangements and a need to reconceptualize sport. From a cultural perspective, the development of sport is a cultural and cognitive process. Sport must not only be organized in various forms, but marked culturally as Communist or capitalist, professional or amateur. Borrowing from Arjun Appadurai’s notion of the social life of things, the author contends that the differences between social history and cultural biography are in the temporality (short vs. long-term processes), class identity (Olympic, ‘Sport for All’ or individual sports) and the social scales of sport (larger and local). As Appadurai points out, ‘it is the social history of things, over large periods of time and at large social levels, that constrains the form, meaning and structure of more short-term, specific and intimate trajectories’. For example, the cultural biography of athletics tells much about what it means in a society at a particular time, its rituals and symbols, the athletes’ and public’s perceptions, its role in forming national identity, or its use by the state and individuals. The social history of athletics tells a lot about the key factors shaping its structure, membership and financing over different periods.