Search

The variable “issue salience” refers to visibility or prominence of a given topic or theme occurring in the news coverage and is used to explore first-level agenda-setting (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). In addition to actor salience and valence, issue salience is analyzed to describe and explore the news coverage on different events and public debates. Mostly, issue salience is measured as the number of mentioning a particular issue, topic, or theme. Field of application/theoretical foundation: Issue salience is analyzed using content analysis across different subfields of communication and media research, including the field of public diplomacy. In public diplomacy research, scholars measure issue salience in the context of governmental communication on their official channels online and offline or the representation of countries in social or mass media. Researchers embed the concept of issue salience primarily in agenda-setting theory (McCombs & Shaw, 1972), analyzing it as an independent variable from which to derive implications of news media coverage on audiences’ perceptions on a certain object or examining the relationship between issue salience in the media and the public agenda. References/combination with other methods of data collection: When it comes to analyses on issue salience and its link to public perceptions, a mixed-method study design incorporating content analysis in combination with surveys is used to validate issue salience. Exampe study: Zhou et al., 2013 Information about Zhou et al., 2013 Authors: Zhang et al. Research question/reseach interest: Comparison between news coverage on Great Britain (in terms of themes) in U.S.-American and Chinese news media during the Olympic Games 2012 RQ: What were the most salient themes in British, U.S., and Chinese media when they covered the opening ceremony of the London Olympics? Object of analysis: Newspaper (30 media outlets across three countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, and China, not explicated) Time frame of analysis: 24 July 2012 to 12 August 2012 Information about variable Varible name/definition: Media coverage salience: Number of mentions given to a particular theme Level of analysis: Story Values: (1) Countryside (e.g., emphasis of British natural beauty and scenic sites) (2) Creativity (e.g., focus on British creative sector, such as arts, film, and literature) (3) Entrepreneurship (e.g., portrayals on entrepreneurs and investors, or global investment) (4) Green (e.g., emphasis on Great Britain’s sustainability and environmental protections efforts) (5) Heritage (e.g., focus on British royalty, museums, and historic landmarks) (6) Innovation (e.g., discussion of science and technology in Great Britain) (7) Knowledge (e.g., portrayals of research and development at British universities) (8) Music (e.g., mentions of British and music artists) (9) Shopping (e.g., emphasis on British shopping venues such as London as shopping city) (10) Sport (e.g., emphasis on sporting events or athletes, such as David Beckham) (11) Technology (e.g., focus on digital media, e-commerce, and IT services in Great Britain) Scales: Nominal Reliability: Krippendorf’s alpha = .90 References McCombs, M. E., & Shaw, D. L. (1972). The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36(2), 176–187. Zhou, S., Shen, B., Zhang, C., & Zhong, X. (2013). Creating a Competitive Identity: Public Diplomacy in the London Olympics and Media Portrayal. Mass Communication & Society, 16(6), 869–887.

Vital mobilities are goods that impact one’s life chances and that cannot be dematerialized. They must circulate externally in order to allow vital bodily circulations. Blood is a compelling and vital mobile material. It circulates impressive distances internally, within the body, and externally through the practices of donation and transfusion.This interview is organized in three parts. First, we learn about the everyday mobilities entailed in blood between the point of donation and the point of care. Second, we discuss three exceptional events that impacted NHS Blood and Transplant: the Manchester bombing, the London Olympics and the Filton Flood. Finally, we conclude by reflect on how social science might inform a research relationship between academic theorization of vital mobilities, which centres on the question, “How do move things when it really matter?” and the applied work of NHS Blood and Transplant.

This article argues that the London 2012 Arts Festival during the London Olympics is an exercise in cultural diplomacy and identifies cultural outcomes like collaboration and changes in international perception based on the work of Milton Cummings. The form and scale of these cultural experiences vary with each Olympic Games, but they allow arts organizations to partner, collaborate and present on an international level. The outcomes of the Olympics are commonly defined in terms of economic improvement and infrastructure development, but the effects of cultural programming are not frequently defined or even examined. For these reasons this article offers a case study of the London 2012 Arts Festival during the London Olympics that frames and identifies its cultural outcomes as the sharing of values, changes in international perception, collaboration between arts institutions, and increased cultural tourism in the host city.

This paper explores the construction of Russia as the Other in a major Western media source. For its theoretical framework, it draws on Stuart Hall’s conception of the representation of the Other through splitting. The study is based on the comparative analysis of the portrayal of Russia and the UK as host nations for two different Olympic Games inThe New York Times. In order to reduce researcher bias, the analysis is conducted using methods of corpus linguistics. Two specialized corpora were compiled: one on the run-up to the 2014 Sochi Olympics and the other to the 2012 London Olympics. Three topics of the typical pre-Olympic discourse are compared: security, construction, and protests. It is observed that these aspects are constructed in binary opposition in the coverage of the two Games, presenting Russia as the West’s constituting Other. The issue of the negative implications of such discourse is raised.

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 study compared and analyzed the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2012 London Olympics, representing Asia and Europe, respectively. In the aspect of the national identity, the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics was a cluster of the “Imperial China” which proposed the image of China as a powerhouse in the future world. The 2012 London Olympics showed the concept of value-oriented populism with the analog methods to express the British society. From the viewpoint of artistic expression, both opening ceremonies are characterized by post-modernism. China pursued eclecticism with the proposal of new science and technologies and high modernistic elements for elegant art with new, serious, and future-oriented concepts. The United Kingdom followed the traditional features of post-modernism including value-orientation, polymorphism, generality, populism, happening, eclecticism, and carefree.

The idea of ‘collective victimhood’, as a cultural and political identity, has long been cultivated by the state within the construction of Chinese nationalism. Through a case study analysis of Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen, this study examines the cultural pedagogy behind the national production and consumption of such ‘victimhood’. We argue that the allegations of Ye Shiwen’s doping by Western media in 2012 London Olympics animates a deep sense of victim mentality in the Chinese public sphere. Here, the Olympic stage is performing both an image of the ‘victor’ for national pride and an autonomous ‘victim’ profile for state legitimation. This study therefore explores the pedagogical normalization of victim identity in Chinese society exercised through the ‘victimization’ efforts oriented around Chinese athletes. It also examines the function of collective memory in (re)shaping and transforming such victimhood into a delicately nuanced and productive collective victimhood intersecting with China’s fut...

London is the only city to have hosted three Summer Olympic Games. It is widely credited with having re-launched the Olympic project in 1908, after a pretty low-level affair in 1904 in St Louis, US...

The dust-jackets of Iain Sinclair’s books are laden with endorsements describing him as the preeminent metropolitan writer of London. Yet those same texts often re-inscribe specifically local and regional practices. A walk around the perimeter of the borough of Hackney, for example, is described, in terms invoking ancient parochial rituals, as “beating the bounds.” This article, focusing on one of London’s most prominent literary spokesmen as a regional or local writer, challenges the conventional binary relationship between metropolis and region. Sinclair’s work does not function under the aegis of this model but overlays competing mappings of the same space on top of one another. Drawing on the idea that London is only knowable as a series of villages, his texts focalize the specificity of particular locales and emphasize first-hand experience of their textures, chiefly through the practices of walking and interviewing locals. For Sinclair, the implications of this regionalism are to be found in defending the “obscurity” of locally-used places, and guarding against their being “overwhelmed by great public schemes.” I draw on examples from a number of Sinclair’s texts that rail against government-endorsed grand projects – the Docklands redevelopment, the Millennium Dome, the London Olympics – to assess their reassertion of regional concerns in the face of centralised (and commercially minded) planning. I argue that these texts oppose the view from central London that adjacent regions are blank spaces ripe for top-down rejuvenation, offering instead a more complex and detailed mapping of their status as regional places in their own right.

The main goal of this paper was to find out more about how and to what extent the local media reported on sporting events at the 2012 London Olympics and to determine the difference in reporting on male and female athletes in the local media. The subject of the research are newspaper articles about sports in electronic news editions, which influence the formation of the media image about athletes, and which can contribute to the affirmation or marginalization of women in sports. In this research for collecting data and information about athletes at the Olympic Games, three media sources were used: RTS, KURIR and POLITIKA. The data have been collected since the opening of the Olympic Games until their official closing ceremony and every day was thoroughly processed in all three media sources. The information included information on the gender of the author of the text, the number of photos in the text, the number of words in the text, the gender of the actors who are on the photos, the level of exposure of the actor's bodies in the photos, the emotions in the photos, the angle of the camera, individual and group display of athletes, active or passive on-site and out-of-court conditions. Generally speaking, the findings of this research in the media space of Serbia show that there is still an imbalance in the way men and women athletes are represented, and that in this respect, there is a need for certain changes in this issue.

After the South Korean men’s soccer team beat its Japanese counterpart in the bronze-medal match at the 2012 London Olympics, South Korean player Park Jung-Woo celebrated with a banner that displayed Dokdo is our land. Dokdo is called the Liancourt Rocks in English, the sovereignty over which has been an ongoing point of contention between South Korea and Japan. This study conducts a critical discourse analysis to examine media representations of Park’s banner celebration, as well as the ensuing discussion in major Korean and Japanese newspapers. The analysis reveals a contrastive picture: The Korean media vocally approached Park’s behavior as an emotional response of self-righteous indignation and quickly enacted memories of Korea’s victimhood in World War II to make justifications, whereas the Japanese media participated in a relatively disengaged absence. Japan’s silence disclosed a glimpse into its rich postwar history of social conflict and political resistance. Such contrast is also indicative of how sport media can be engaged in nuanced social contexts, generating representations that serve nation-state regimes situated in different political dynamics.

During the summer of 2012, and to coincide with the Olympics, BBC2 broadcast a series called The Hollow Crown, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of English history plays. The BBC commission was conceived as part of the Cultural Olympiad which accompanied Britain’s successful hosting of the Games that summer. I discuss the financial, technical, aesthetic, and political choices made by the production team, not only in the context of the Coalition government (and its attacks on the BBC) but also in the light of theatrical and film tradition. I argue that the inclusion or exclusion of two key scenes suggest something more complex and balanced that the usual nationalism of the plays'; rather, the four nations are contextualised to comprehend and acknowledge the regions - apropos not only in the Olympic year, but in 2014's referendum on the Union of the crowns of England/Wales and Scotland.

To measure relationships between Olympic media viewing and nation-based attitudes, 6 nations (Australia, Bulgaria, China, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and the United States) were surveyed in the 5 days immediately after the 2012 London Olympics. A total of 1,025 respondents answered questions pertaining to four measures of nationalism: patriotism, nationalism, internationalism, and smugness. The amount of Olympic viewing resulted in significantly higher scores for patriotism, nationalism, and smugness, but not internationalism. In addition, differences by nation are reported, revealing considerable differences in nationalism measures among the 6 nations studied; for instance, the United States was the lowest of the 6 nations regarding internationalism yet highest of the 6 nations regarding smugness. Conclusions related to theory and the role of Olympic media content are offered.

Sports events such as the Olympics are ideal venues for a country to exercise public diplomacy and to promote a competitive identity. Along this line of theorizing, the present study examined how Britain planned and presented the opening ceremony of the London Olympics and how the media in Britain, the United States, and China portrayed the show, specifically focusing on the salience of media coverage, valence of particular attitudes expressed, and differences in themes coverage. A content analysis was conducted on 221 news stories sampled from major media outlets in these countries. Results showed only a few themes with unique Britishness were prominently and positively covered, whereas others without distinctive British characteristics were less mentioned. Implications for public diplomacy are discussed.

Social media have changed the way that social actors participate in sports events. “Prosumers” are able to directly offer different interpretations without journalists’ mediation when a social issue arises. However, social media do not fundamentally change the significance of cultural narratives in communication. This study focuses on discussions initiated by a commercial feed on a Chinese microblogging site during the 2012 London Olympic Games. Qualitative textual analysis was conducted. The study found that enduring cultural narratives create the predrafts of social-media communication; the instantaneity of microblogging referred to not simply its physical appearance but also the meaning of that appearance. In addition, social-media texts illustrate a society’s ongoing stories. Going beyond the limitations of previous control-vs.-freedom paradigms, this study explores a Chinese consumer society that is more dynamic and complex than previous studies would suggest.

This essay draws the contours of the Japanese response to the 2012 London Olympics and the Games' perceived relevance to Japan's sports administration in the coming decades. The analysis is based on Japanese mass media reports and press commentaries that appeared in Japan's four leading national dailies (Asahi, Mainichi, Yomiuri and Sankei) and the Nippon Keizai Shinbun (Nikkei; the Japanese equivalent of the Wall Street Journal) before, during and in the aftermath of the London Olympic Games.

London 2012 was a contradiction of Kipling's meretricious couplet about East and West. What was the response of the East, specifically the South Korean media, to London's selection as the host city of the 2012 Olympics? Furthermore, what were the various viewpoints of the South Korean media regarding the significance of London hosting the Olympic Games hard on the heels of the Beijing Olympics? Answers to these questions can provide insights into the geopolitics and politics of modern South Korea, which has very different relationships with China and Britain. An analysis, macroscopic and microscopic, in terms of politics, economics and culture, of media reactions in South Korea to the Olympics of the two nations can provide illuminating insights into a sports mega-event as an instrument of soft power.

Amusement, diversion, fun. This was the definition of sport offered by the first dictionary I consulted in preparation for this lecture, and if we accept it then there is at least a sporting chance that we will all be able to agree: mountaineering is a sport. But it is not a definition that sits easily with much of what sport is currently thought to be. This talk is part of a series on Philosophy and Sport timed to mark the London Olympics, and amusement and fun are probably not the first words to spring to mind there, certainly not for the competitors. They may be a part of it, but I don't think it unreasonable to think more immediately of commerce, competition, achievement. So this evening I need to consider mountaineering within that context. I also want to make clear at the outset that I shall take mountaineering to mean not just the climbing of high snow-covered peaks, but mountain travel and exploration, and simply recreational mountain walking. There doesn't need to be anything technical involved. At the same time, I must include rock-climbing within my brief, and for at least two reasons. One is that rock-climbing and mountaineering are closely connected historically. In it's early years, alpine climbing often led to rock climbing, the latter being seen as geographically convenient training for ‘the real thing’ – namely, the annual alpine holiday. When I was a teenager in the 1970s the influence went the other way: I began with rock-climbing in the Lake District, and proceeded to alpine climbing. And secondly, rock-climbing and mountaineering are administratively and politically connected. I suspect that the former, which in Britain as often as not doesn't take place in mountains at all, now absorbs the major part of the public funds devoted to these matters. And it is predominantly on the British experience that I want to draw.

Television coverage of the Beijing Olympics was estimated to reach 70% of the world's population; London reached even more. The Olympic Games – in particular the opening ceremonies and the national medal contest – are providing global citizens with a common talking point about political systems, and the Internet is increasingly opening up a space for discussion across national borders. The London Olympic opening ceremony provided a forum for comparisons with the Beijing Olympic ceremony, with each representing a political system. East Asia as a region has been rising in the medal count, which has also sparked comparisons of Japanese, Chinese and North and South Korean political systems. The result is a more sophisticated understanding of political systems and a surprising number of shared viewpoints about the obligations of governments to their people, how they should spend their money and their future orientations. In today's increasingly connected world, the Olympics may be bringing us closer than we th...

In 2005, London won the Olympic and Paralympic Games for the UK capital in 2012. The city's bid featured two leading promises: That London Olympics in 2012 would be an Olympics for the whole UK; an...

This article highlights the distinctive turn in public discourse towards historical resources, analogies and stories to help citizens make sense of the current era of austerity through a selective analysis of the media coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games. It argues that in straitened times British citizens are being asked to make do, to accept the rolling back of state provision and to modify their expectations of a civil society on the basis of historical myths as well as current realities. Having noted this, the article asks where on television are the counter-discourses that may also wish to lay a claim to a national history and to tell national stories and even to contest the dismantling of the welfare state? How might these spaces work to resist the prevalent criticism of public services, organized labour and popular protest and to defend the class (and other) politics and values with which these have been historically associated? In answer to these questions this article offers a brief consideration of the ways in which the 2012 London Olympics Opening Ceremony deployed history and historical reference.

The global media spotlight was switched onto Great Britain for at least 17 days during the 2012 London Olympics. Media debates on Britain's identity raged on from the first minute of the opening ceremony. On the basis of the notions of nation branding, competitive identity and public diplomacy, this study examined reactions of the mainstream media in China to the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, with specific focus given to the amount of media coverage, particular attitudes expressed by news reporters and interpretations or themes emphasised. A content analysis was conducted of 100 news stories sampled from six major Chinese media outlets. Results and implications were discussed.

1. Realising the Olympic dream - bring on the alchemists 2. Coaching for performance: an interview with Olympic diving coach, Andy Banks 3. Coaching for performance: reflections of Olympic diving coach, Andy Banks 4. Reflection and the art of coaching: fostering high-performance in Olympic Ski Cross 5. 'One door closes, a next door opens up somewhere': the learning of one Olympic synchronised swimmer 6. Stories of success: Cultural narratives and personal stories of elite and professional athletes 7. Thought Piece: Realising the Olympic dream: vision, support and challenge 8. Developing rapid high-pressure team decision-making skills. The integration of slow deliberate reflective learning within the competitive performance environment: A case study of elite netball 9. Reflections on a dream: towards an understanding of factors Olympic coaches attribute to their success 10. Sacrifice: the lonely Olympic road 11. 'Multi-directional management': exploring the challenges of performance in the World Class Programme environment 12. Politics, power & the podium: coaching for Paralympic performance 13. Thought Piece: The political process of constructing a sustainable London Olympics sport legacy: three years on

When Australian diver Matthew Mitcham produced a world-record score with his final dive from the 10m platform to win the gold medal at the Beijing Olympics, he did so as the 'only openly gay man at the Olympics'. This paper examines the Australian print media's narrative of Mitcham leading into, during and after the Games. In the hetero-normative world of Australian sport, the normative narrative carries four storylines: performance, national identity, masculinity and significant relationships. Combined, these storylines resonate with audiences and have the potential to create the vortex of publicity required to launch an athlete into the world of sponsorship and celebrity. Initially, with few exceptions, the media fails to write the masculinity and significant-relationships storylines about Mitcham and he fails to gain sponsorship. However, free of the narrative conventions and constraints of an Olympic games, it is the very same media that proceed to write in the missing narratives post-Olympics and act almost as activists on Mitcham's behalf. The result is Mitcham's transformation into a marketable, popular sporting celebrity: sitting comfortably in both mainstream and LGBT culture and sport, a role model for young same-sex-attracted people, and a voice of experience about homophobia and issues of sexuality in sport. Leading into the London Olympics, stories about Mitcham contribute to an alternative masculine narrative that becomes available for young sportsmen and women to consider.

As a metaphor for the London Olympics, it could hardly be more stark. 1 The much-derided ‘Wenlock’ Olympic mascot is now available in London Olympic stores dressed, no less, as a Metropolitan polic...

‘ On the Olympics she [Tessa Jowell] was telling me it was an enormous opportunity. Think of the impact on our young people, on fitness, on sport, on the country's self-belief. I would say but supp...

The legacy promise of the London Olympic Games was a major feature of the original bid, and one of the elements that contributed to its success. It has been claimed that the London legacy has recei...

This article describes the churches’ response to the challenge of the London Olympics and Paralympics. It notes the work of denominations and the ecumenical response through More Than Gold. It suggests that the experience points to new developments in ecumenism and highlights the lack of a theology of sport. It suggests that the Church will be deeply engaged in enabling participation in the Games, and in raising questions about their legacy.

Rodanthi Tzanelli's volume offers an intricate and perceptive analysis of the multi-layered messages communicated through Olympic Ceremonies, focusing on the 2012 London Olympics. The publication i...

Amidst the numerous words written about the reality and impact of the London Olympics, the focus has essentially been on the gains that can be garnered from the Olympics as a tool for corporate mar...

During the Labour Party's preparation for the 1948 London Olympic Games, which were held from 29 July to 16 August and were, although only three years after the Yalta Agreement of 11 February 1945, an attempt to point the United Kingdom resolutely into the future, the French press did not hesitate to criticize the resourcefulness and relaxed attitude of the British. France's ambivalent perception was, moreover, further magnified by the absence of Germany, Japan and the USSR, which reopened the question of politics in sport and its use for propaganda purposes, 12 years after the nationalist excesses of the Berlin Games. Analysis of coverage concerning the ‘Reconciliation Games’ in the main French papers highlights the contrasted effect of the London Olympics and illustrates the predominant weight of political ideologies in the construction of national identities. Finally, it underlines the recurrent difficulties encountered in bringing together the French and the British who were, immediately after the Sec...

In 1948, Spain, under the regime of the General Franco, participated in its first summer Olympics since 1932, following the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. Sixty-seven Spanish athletes competed in nine different sports and the reasons why these sports were selected will be analysed here. Focusing upon Spanish participation, this article explores the historical importance of the London Olympics for Spain as an international showcase. In order to achieve a balanced view of the attitude of Spain on this Olympiad, it is necessary to analyse both the official documents and the national press, controlled by the state by means of an iron censorship with some signs of a slight openness. Historical analysis of these documents will result in a comprehensive and rigorous study on the Spaniards' perception of the Olympic Games, the athletes' achievements, the attitude of the press and the political use of the event by Franco to gain international acceptance.

It sometimes seems as if all the world is on the move.1 The early retired, international students, terrorists, holidaymakers, business people, slaves, sports stars, asylum seekers, backpackers and ...

This symposium arises from a public event held on 14 March 2008 by the Academy of Social Sciences, in cooperation with the University of East London, as part of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) 2008 Festival of Social Sciences. The purpose of the symposium is to explore the contribution which social scientists can make to the understanding of the London Olympics, and to clarify issues of public benefit of different kinds which arise from the hosting of the 2012 Games in London.

Despite being the first Summer Olympics held after the Second World War, the 1948 London Olympics have failed to attract the historical interest accorded to subsequent Olympiads. Focusing upon the British government, this article explores the historical significance of the XIV Olympiad. Quite apart from helping to re-launch the Olympic movement following the lengthy gap since the 1936 Berlin games, the 1948 London Olympics offer useful insights into the development of both the Olympic movement and the policy of British governments towards the Olympics. Firstly, the event reaffirmed recent trends qualifying the Olympic movement's enduring attempt to stress that the Olympics really were ‘games’ rising above political and commercial issues; secondly, it prompted yet another chapter in the long-running controversy about sport's impact upon international relations; thirdly, despite marking substantial advances in the policy of British governments towards international sport, the Olympiad failed to usher in a s...

As you will see from the chapters within this book, athletes at the top of the sporting ladder have a number of challenges put before them: these take the form of opponents, environmental conditions and their own mindset, to name but a few. One excellent example of this comes from Usain Bolt, the six-time Olympic champion who, until the Diamond League meeting in Rome on 6 June 2013, had remained unbeaten at major international meetings since his false-start disqualification at the World Championships in South Korea in August 2011. Having been placed second in the Diamond League event, Bolt was quoted as saying, ‘I would say that my determination is not as much as it used to be . . . you have to try to find things to motivate you and push yourself harder’. Further to his reflections on his first ‘major’ defeat, and given the new world acclaim that he has received since winning three gold medals at the London Olympics, Bolt commented that:Starting the season was the roughest part for me – trying to drive myself . . . it has been really crazy since the Olympics. It has been hard for me to get everything together because there are more demands, it is tough.

The title sequence of Chariots of Fire – filmed on the West Sands beach of St Andrews, Scotland – has become one of the most reworked and reinterpreted moments of British cinema, transposed across a variety of places, politics and times. In exploring these moves – from the period of its setting in 1924, through its production in 1980, and to its most recent reworkings in the London 2012 Olympics – the article examines the constantly evolving legacies of the sequence and the cultural capital which it has accrued via these various contexts. By considering the original production and its subsequent multiple receptions, the article positions the sequence at the vanguard of shifts in film production and cultural heritage. Viewed from the vantage point of the 2012 Olympics, the film provides an integral source of cultural capital not just for national but also for local and regional economies as they increasingly target new sources of revenue in a post-industrial age. Postprint

Foreword: Legacy, the FIFA Perspective (Jerome Valcke) Introduction: Sport, Legacy and Leadership (Richard Holt and Dino Ruta) Reflections on legacy: Olympic cities and London 2012 (Denis Oswald) Part 1: Planning and Governance of Legacy 1. A Strategic and Pluralistic approcach to legacy: the case of the Giro d'Italia (Dino Ruta) 2. Economic legacy to cities of hosting mega sports events: a case study of Beijing 2008 (Chris Gratton, Holger Preuss and Dongfeng Liu) 3. The 1908 Olympic Games: a case study in accidental and incidental legacies (Martin Polley) 4. A stakeholder analysis of the governance of the 2010 FIFA World Cup - a case study of the city of Cape Town (Kamilla Swart, Urmilla Bob and Dean Allen) 5. Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games: Modes of Legacy Network Governance (Becca Leopkey and Milena Parent) Part 2: Urbanisation and Legacy 6. Sydney Olympic Park 2000 to 2010: A Case Study of Legacy Implementation over the Longer Term (Richard Cashman) 7. Croke Park as a historic venue: combining national legacy with multiple use (Mike Cronin) 8. The Legacy of Memory: The Stockholm and Helsinki Olympic stadia as living memorials (Alan Bairner) 9. The legacy of the 2004 Olympics for the Athens transport system (Eva Kassens-Noor) 10. Framing the future: sustainability, legacy and the 2012 London Games (John and Margaret Gold) Part 3: Social and Cultural Legacies 11. Paralympic Legacy: What Legacy? (Keith Gilbert and Otto J. Schantz) 12. A Lost Legacy of Fraternity? The case of European youth football (Kevin Tallec Marston) 13. Cultural Olympiad or an Olympics for cultural regeneration? 'Torino 2006' and its legacy (Chito Guala) 14. Major sporting events and long-lasting tourism impacts: 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany (Holger Preuss and Harry Arne Solberg) 15. A socially responsible business legacy: Raising standards in procurement, supply chains and employment at the London Olympics of 2012 (Jill Timms) Part 4: Human Capital and Legacy 16. City Capacity Building: Preparing to Exploit the Legacy of a Large-Scale Sports Event. The Case of Valencia and the 2007 America's Cup (Dino Ruta and Beatrice Manzoni) 17. Transferring knowledge, know-how and capability: Managing and sharing knowledge for future events (Sue Halbwirth and Kristine Toohey) 18. From the first soccer Women's World Championship in 1991 to the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008: How capacity-building in small scale tournaments can help win Mega-event bids (Jean Williams) 19. Learning Disability Sport, Volunteers and Legacy: The Case of Special Olympics Great Britain National Games 2009 (John Williams and Neil Carter) 20. The Impact of the Olympics on the High Performance Legacy of a Host Country (Matthew Robinson) Part 5: The Politics and Image of Legacy 21. The political and diplomatic legacy of the Montreal Olympics (Danielle Griffin) 22. Media, Sport and Memory: the Mediated Legacies of Great Sporting Events (Tim O'Sullivan and Dilwyn Porter) 23. 'Global visibility and prestige': the anticipated legacies of mega sporting events in the Gulf States (David Hassan and Maurice Field) 24. Modern temples of marble and concrete: the legacy of the unsuccessful Olympic ambition of fascist Rome (Daphne Bolz) 25. The mixed legacy of Munich: The material, cultural and political consequences of the 1972 Olympic Games (Kay Schiller and Christopher Young)

1. Megasport in a Mega-City to a Mega-Audience: The Impact of 2012 London Olympic Media 2. Olympics Everywhere: Predictors of Multiplatform Media Uses During the 2012 London Olympics 3. Creating a Competitive Identity: Public Diplomacy in the London Olympics and Media Portrayal 4. Celebrity Athletes, Soft Power and National Identity: Hong Kong Newspaper Coverage of the Olympic Champions of Beijing 2008 and London 2012 5. From Pride to Smugness and the Nationalism Between: Olympic Media Consumption Effects on Nationalism Across the Globe

I write this as the London Olympics come to a close and I touch down in Hong Kong airport, having spent two memorable weeks in the UK. Four years after Beijing handed the Olympic torch to London – ...

When I mentioned to her, in the summer of 2014, that I was planning to write a book about the politics of the London Olympics of 2012, my daughter, worldly-wise and in her later 30s, told me to be careful: these Games were, after all, very popular — no sense, therefore, in my making myself some kind of pariah by criticising them in print. This (perfectly sound) piece of advice prompts a number of important prefatory comments.

The rituals of the Olympic Games are a case study in the invention of tradition. In particular, from the time of the founding of the modern Olympics in the late nineteenth century to the contemporary deliberations of IOC marketing strategists, some kinship to the rites of the original festival in ancient Greece has been either claimed or implied. At the centre of this mythologising has stood the Olympic flame, which was never more prominently displayed than at London 2012.

The 2012 Olympic Games was an event watched on television by billions of viewers worldwide. In the United States, approximately 40 million people viewed a tape-delayed opening ceremony of the games on the NBC network. With such a high viewership, NBC was in a position of power to influence and educate their audience on the various countries across the globe who participated in the Olympic Games and opening ceremony. Drawing on Gregory's notion of a ‘geographic imagination’, we suggest NBC editors put their version of the world on display to the American audience, thus influencing the way in which American viewers may understand the world. In this paper, we have constructed a map to provide a visual representation of NBC's geographic imagination. We find this map, based on total screen time the countries received during the ‘Parade of Nations’ segment of the opening ceremony, to suggest a unique geographic imagination worthy of further study because of its potential wide influence.

Li Ning had the weight of a nation on his shoulders at the 1988 Summer Olympic Games in Seoul, Korea. He was a national hero after winning three gold medals in gymnastics at China’s first summer Olympics appearance four years earlier in Los Angeles. Unlike today’s China, which topped the gold medal count at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and came in second at the 2012 London Olympics, Li Ning’s achievements in 1984 were remarkable for a nation new to the Olympic stage. Unfortunately, Li Ning faltered at the Seoul Games and did not win a single medal. Deeply disappointed, Li Ning felt he was returning home a national disappointment rather than a national hero. Doing everything he could to avoid media scrutiny, Li Ning wandered around South Korea’s Kimpo International Airport searching for a moment of solitude. By chance he bumped into another famous “Li” — Li Jingwei, founder of jianlibao Group, China’s most famous beverage brand and sports drink maker. Li Jingwei encouraged Li Ning to think seriously about the next stage in his career. As a former Olympic gold medalist, Li Ning would still have plenty of opportunities to be sponsored by Chinese brands, but Li jingwei convinced Li Ning that the Olympic gymnast himself had enough brand power to build his own company.