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In the opening plenary on the first key theme, “education futures”, Prof David Russell (founder of The Russell Partnership and Chairman of The Total Simulator Company) gave a presentation titled “Future Proofing the Student Experience” about his involvement in the London Olympics 2012 and the lessons learnt from major events. He regarded developing scenario planning, applying personalisation, building a sustainable process, gaining customer profiling r Graciella Karijomedjo. Published in the Journal of Tourism Futures. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at: http:// creativecommons.org/licences/by/ 4.0/legalcode

The build-up to the 2012 Olympics was fraught with problems and attracted considerable negative publicity in both the British and international press. One key component of this involved security at the Games, with the inability of G4S, the private security firm awarded the contract for Games security, to fulfil its obligations, resulting in a major shift in security provision in the weeks leading up to the Games. Our research on spectators’ perceptions of safety and security in London during the Games attains particular significance in this context. However, while previous studies have suggested a heightened crime and disorder problem associated with tourism and at mass public events, the findings here demonstrate that visitors to the Olympics saw London, and the Olympic venues, as safe, in terms of both crime and terrorism, with positive consequences for their future plans to revisit London. The evidence suggests that Olympic security was a success for the government and the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG), despite the negative publicity attached to G4S and the private security sector more generally.

This article examines the ambivalent effect of the ArcelorMittal Orbit artwork locally and globally, considering the process of its production and the impact of its final outcome. The ArcelorMittal Orbit aspires to become a permanent emblem of the regeneration of East London and a model for sustainability. However, its level of engagement with the surrounding area and the public and its relationship to ecological priorities are uncertain. The sculpture finds itself between art and architecture and enters the global architectural competitiveness often fostered by the Olympics, which frequently follows ambiguous practices in contemporary urban regeneration.

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.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether agenda setting was present on Twitter during the 2012 London Olympics. In order to analyze the presence of agenda setting, tweets from the @London2012 account and tweets containing #London2012 were analyzed. The @London2012 account served as the news outlet, while tweets containing #London2012 served as the unit of analysis to determine whether agenda setting was present. A content analysis of these tweets revealed significant differences between the two groups in terms of tweet focus, sports mentioned, and countries mentioned, suggesting no agenda setting presence on Twitter. Additionally, the primary affiliation of individuals utilizing #London2012 was laypeople, which aligned with previous Twitter-specific research. The implications of these and other findings will be discussed further.

Synopsis In this article we focus on moral panic driven publicity and policy surrounding female victims of sexual assault and sex trafficking in Australian and international contexts. The case studies comprise a series of racialised gang rapes in Sydney, Australia between 2000 and 2004, and anti-sex trafficking campaigns around major sporting events including the 2006 World Cup in Germany and 2012 London Olympics. While heightened public awareness around the sexual victimisation of women is welcome, we also critique the sort of attention that these cases and their victims receive, questioning whether increased publicity and knee-jerk policies around certain sex crimes is genuinely based on the realities of women's victimisation. We seek to demonstrate that moral panic driven attention for victims neither eases their suffering nor necessarily bolsters their rights while interrogating who does come to benefit from such “feminist” causes, and how we should begin to re-think our engagement with women's victimisation.

1948 was South Korea's first ever appearance in the Olympics – a poor country, forced to adjust to division on the peninsula, with a limited athletic presence. But South Korea won its first medals and contributed to the tortuous process of securing its international standing. Sixty-four years later, by the time of its second appearance in a London Olympics South Korea had become a powerful economy with a high international profile and a strong athletic representation – coming 5th in the final medal table. This study compares and contrasts not just the two London Olympics in terms of athletic performances but also the changed roles for South Korea within both the global sporting community and broader international society. Despite the continuing division on the peninsula, the two London Olympics provide symbols and markers of the aspirations, achievements and failures of South Korean policy-makers and their people.

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.

South Korea has often been considered a successful host nation after the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games and their apparent positive economic, cultural, social and environmental legacies. The purpose of this essay is to offer an analysis of economic growth as a consequence of earlier Olympic Games and to extrapolate to the 2012 London Olympic Games and beyond to the forthcoming 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. It is the intention of this essay to examine previous studies, economic indices of world banks and reports of each Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (OCOG). The hypothesis is that the Olympic Games have not positively influenced the economic growth of the host nations. The essay explores this conclusion with reference to London 2012. The essay will reveal past negative influences of the Olympic Games and ask the International Olympic Committee (IOC): ‘What is the IOC's responsibility to the host city after the Games?’ Finally, the essay will propose and recommend an economic tool to the IOC to ens...

Sport and politics have a close relationship. Political conflicts are re-enacted, reflected and reinforced on international sports stages. In East Asia, the past casts a long shadow! It darkened the London 2012 stage. Controversy followed a South Korean football player's celebration at the London Olympics semi-final match between South Korea and Japan. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) banned the player, Park, Jong-woo, from participating in the bronze medal ceremony. He was accused by the IOC of a political act that violated IOC and FIFA regulations. Park's celebration included holding up and carrying around a sign which was interpreted by the IOC as a political message about a South Korean territorial dispute with Japan. The incident became a lead story in the South Korean media. The IOC's decision caused intense nationwide indignation and an outpouring of anti-Japanese sentiment. It was not a unique incident. This essay examines media representations of the incident and how political controvers...

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...

The performance of the transport network and the associated movement of people was one of the most critical elements to London’s successful delivery of the 2012 Olympic Games. During the planning stages Transport for London asked the London Borough of Newham to mitigate the impact of the authority’s 13 500 employees on transport infrastructure close to the Olympic Park. To achieve this, the authority needed to understand the geographic distribution of its workforce and the demand it placed on roads and local transport hubs. The authority’s Geospatial Team led the research based on four cross-referenced data sources, and spatial analysis was used to determine priorities for special absence arrangements and a commissioned coach service. The research was used to support a targeted information campaign but also presented considerations on large-scale data collection, the use of Human Resources data, and the degree to which the movement of people can be measured and managed.

As critical research on religion, the study of colonialism and religion directs attention to religious creativity within the asymmetrical power relations of contact zones, intercultural relations, and diasporic circulations. Taking the imperial ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics as a point of departure, this article recalls how the drama of the colonizing Prospero and the colonized Caliban has been a template for analyzing religion under colonial conditions. Like Shakespeare’s enchanted isle, colonizing and colonized religion have been shaped by oceans, with the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific worlds emerging as crucial units of analysis. As a contribution to a symposium on critical approaches to the study of religion, this article indicates some of the important landmarks, sea changes, and analytical possibilities in the study of colonialism and religion.

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.

This article studies similarities and disparities between the two nations England and Norway as they could be observed before and during the London 2012 Olympics, and discuss them in the historical perspective of geopolitical and sportive relations. The main perspective is how these relations have been seen and experienced from Norway. The article also studies whether the London Olympics of 2012 did present new forms of relationships between the two geographical neighbours. The article discusses the role of ball games, preferably team handball at the 2012 Games, as one example of where sporting interests differ. The article reflects upon these matters in a historical context. It builds upon traditional historical methods, document and media analysis. It also looks at the 2012 London Olympics against the background of the former London Games of 1908 and 1948, and the overall historical sports relations between England, ‘land of sport’ and a small country like Norway, who generally has been on the receiving end of these interchanges. Such asymmetric relationships invite to a critical use of perspectives like cultural imperialism and post-colonialism. The article discusses whether such perspectives can be fruitful also when one discusses matters between the so-called First World nations. As the title of the article indicates, Norway and England are both close, politically and culturally, while also being strangers to one another, e.g. in parts of the sports culture. The 2012 Olympics seemed to reinforce this impression.

Olympic sport is a double-edged sword. It has the potential to bring nations together and to transmit values, but it can also demonstrate international political tensions and conflicting national structural characteristics. As part of the International Olympic Movement from the very beginning, Hungary is one of the few nations to have taken part in the (Summer) Olympic Games in London for the third time. The Olympic presence of Hungary has been almost continuous in spite of the significant transformations of its state ideology, sport structures and political background. In 1908, within the framework of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the Hungarian Kingdom endeavoured to demonstrate its autonomy and courage with its memorable Olympic successes in London. A People's Republic was being formed in Hungary at the time of the second London Olympic Games in 1948. The socialist ideology and the self-display of socialist–communist ambitions characterised the preparation and the participation of the Hungarian athlete...

The package of special tax arrangements for the 2012 London Olympics ensures a beneficial treatment for numerous people officially involved in the organization of, and participation in, the Games. British taxpayers may not realize that they are unofficial sponsors of the 2012 London Olympics. Sports fans and haters alike are going to foot the tax bill for the International Olympic Committee and businesses involved in the Olympic Games because the UK government has offered a full tax exemption for any Olympics-related income. However, unlike in the case of official sponsors, there has been no negotiation or a contract with the general public which has to cover the cost of a privately held sports event. The bargaining power of the International Olympic Committee has enabled them to demand tax-free treatment and an above the law position. As a result, the Olympic Games in London have their own tax regime that constitutes a departure from the general principles of taxation in force in England.

The purpose of the study was to determine the effect of a team's level on the performance of skills (serve, reception, spike, block and dig) in high level volleyball. Thirty-eight mens matches of London Olympics Games 2012 and 38 mens matches of the Olympics Games of Beijing 2008 were purchased from the international volleyball Federation and analyzed. The performance of skills was evaluated in relation to the success and options that these skills give to one's team. The team's level was established in relation to the final classification of the team in both competitions (level 1: 1st - 4th; level 2: 5th - 8th; & level 3: 9th - 12th). Six observers participated in the study. In London Olympics Games 2012 the results show a high significant difference between teams' levels for the skills of spiking and setting. The dig and reception are the skills that differentiates the teams of level 1 with the teams of level 2. In Beijing Olympics Games2008, we found a significant difference in the performance of the set in the teams of level 1. An increase in success of reception, spike, reception and dig in relation to the level of the team is observed.

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.

‘It's not for us and all the promises of affordable homes and local jobs is nothing but hot air and the real people benefiting are the large businesses.' The words of a homeless youth in temporary housing in one of the boroughs adjacent to the London Olympics site. Nearby some residents of an estate claim that their proposed displacement/replacement/'development' is ‘social cleansing in the name of … corporate objectives.’ Do such claims apply universally to working class and many ‘middle class’ people that find themselves enmeshed in such development(s)? If so, could it be otherwise? This issue of CITY follows out the contradictions of these and related developments in six other contexts. In European borderlands, Henrick Lebuhn notes that not just the nature of border control but also that of urban citizenship is at issue. In U.S. cities (and beyond) Joshua Long looks at the counter-claim for respecting and enhancing the essential ‘weirdness’ of particular cities as contrasted to the marginalizing unifor...

This chapter surveys a number of works by Anthony Burgess—his novels Nothing Like the Sun and Enderby’s Dark Lady, his biography Shakespeare, and his unproduced Hollywood musical The Bawdy Bard, in order to demonstrate continual interpenetrations in his work between historical scholarship, literary criticism, and fiction-making. Holderness then goes on to demonstrate how these different methodologies can be made to interact, introducing extracts from his own short story, “The Seeds of Time.” Underpinned by a cultural materialist study of the presence of Shakespeare in a series of national festivals—the great Exhibition of 1851, the Festival of Britain in 1951, and the London Olympics of 2012—this story uses imaginative methods to pursue a critical inquiry, combining documentary evidence and critical argument with imaginative speculation.

This chapter reflects on the potent combination of melancholy and nostalgia that can be associated with the cinematic presentation of change in cities. Opening with a discussion of two versions of Lionel Bart’s song, ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be’, the chapter argues against a generalised nostalgia for the vanished city. Instead it seeks to demonstrate the importance of attention to the particularity of what has been lost, its formal presentation and its contexts. This argument is developed through the analysis of filmic responses to the particular, planned development of two East London places at two different periods: Hessel Street (as part of mid-twentieth-century slum clearance) and the Lower Lea Valley (as preparation for the 2012 London Olympics). The discussion of two films, The Vanishing Street (1962) and What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? (2005), which have as their topic these locations, explores the complicated meshing of time and place produced within each, and the different kinds of loss anticipated and explored. This study is concerned with the peculiar ability of film to offer its audiences images of what was once part of the material city and is now gone, and with both the tense and tone of these meditations. The ghostly cities preserved on film are always the product of particular circumstances, and should be attended to as such.

On the 2012 London Olympics Games, the badminton match-throwings have got wide attention aross the world. Based on the systematic information collection from the Web and newspapers, this paper makes an element analysis on the key factors that cause the lacklustre performances from the perspective of Extenics. Using extension transformation method we make an attempt to find a systematic and optimal approach for solving such incompatible problems in sports cases based on extension set theory and game theory. The quantitative analysis method and extension innovation method will be a new tool for management innovation in sports field.

The hosting of the London 2012 Olympic Games was seen as an opportunity to harness the enthusiasm of the 70,000 volunteers involved and to provide a post-event volunteer legacy. A total of 77 individuals who had acted as volunteers in London 2012 were contacted approximately four years after the Games and agreed to complete a web-based open-ended survey. The participants were asked to indicate their level of current volunteering engagement and whether volunteering at the Games had an impact on their current volunteering levels. The study found that the London Olympics were the first volunteer experience for most of the volunteers who completed the survey, with the main motivation to volunteer being anything related to the Olympic Games. Just over half of the respondents are currently volunteering. Lack of time is shown to be the main barrier towards further volunteering commitment. Only half of respondents had been contacted by a volunteering scheme after London 2012. The implications of the findings for a potential volunteering legacy are then explored.

The 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the biggest event in human sports, was held in Rio de Janeiro with more than 10,500 athletes from 206 countries over the world competing for the highest of sports honors, an Olympic medal. With the hope that the Olympic ideal accompanies all aspects of the XXXI Olympiad, WADA accredited antidoping laboratories use the spearhead of analytical technology as a powerful tool in the fight against doping. This review summarizes the main analytical developments applied in antidoping testing methodology combined with the main amendments on the WADA regulations regarding analytical testing starting from the 2012 London Olympics until the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how the combination of critical discourse analysis and corpus-linguistic methodology can be used to study global sports events, especially their impact on the representations of identities. The study of media texts around global events, such as the London Olympics and the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, can yield important insights into the identities which are ideologically normalised in the reporting of such events, and those which are devalued or excluded. Our study focuses on these two events in particular as the Olympics and the World Cup are regarded as ‘the most dramatic and high profile’ global sports events (Tomlinson & Young, 2006: 1) in that the ‘whole world is watching … the same thing at the same time’ (Rowe, 2003: 284). Media representations generated at these times can be seen to be high-impact reflections of cultural assumptions, tailored to coincide with the expectations and beliefs of the audiences of the mass media. Global sports events are thus prominent representations of not only national ideologies (Kinkema and Harris. MediaSport studies: Key research and emerging issues. In L. A. Wenner (Ed.), MediaSport (pp. 27–54). London: Routledge, 1998), but also of ethnicity and race, as well as gender (Hunt & Jaworska, in press), revealing detailed patterns of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991). In the proposed chapter we demonstrate the synergistic relationship possible in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) (see Baker, 2008; Baker et al., Discourse and Society, 19(3): 273–306, 2008; Partington, Duguid, & Taylor, Corpora and discourse, a most congruous beast. In A. Partington, J. Morley, & L. Haarman (Eds.), Corpora and discourse (pp. 9–18). Frankfurt/M: Peter La, 2013), showing how systematic linguistic analysis can yield ideological insights whilst resting on a quantitative base of statistically significant relationships and patterns in language use. Our data comprise a corpus of nearly 30 million words, sampled from national newspaper texts published in Britain from 2011 to 2013 and in South Africa (SA) from 2009 to 2012, in order to track the impact of the respective sporting event on media representation, as suggested by McEnery et al. (2013). Both events boosted representations of national unity in the year of the event, but there was little carry through of the gains to the following year. Divisions in terms of race were maintained, especially in the SA context, whilst gendered representations were often positive in the British context.

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.

based on using multiple methods which involve literature search, expert interview and data analysis, the article Diagnosed and analyzed the technical and tactical characteristics of the China National Boxing Championship of ten levels which found that there are big difference in the score distribution, frequency of use of boxing, tactical frequency of use, hitting parts of the frequency of use, hitting effective boxing and so, through the comparative analysis, looking for levels of the inherent laws to guide Chinese boxing team on training and competition for better effect, and provide a certain basis on achieving better results in London Olympics

This article considers how the development of the Olympic Park for the London 2012 Games recast the already complex governance arrangements for regeneration in the area around the site, creating a new set of relationships between government, local stakeholders and the wider public. The tension between effective top-down delivery arrangements and ‘bottom-up’ regeneration is reviewed through a brief case study of changing governance arrangements in the Lower Lea in the decade between bidding and hosting the 2012 Games. Evidence is drawn from the author's reflections on his professional work in the area and from a literature review, including public reports, and documentation of meetings, events and processes. A limited number of interviews with fellow practitioners were held. Tentative conclusions are drawn about how, in similar large-scale projects in the future, the process might be better managed to minimise the necessary disruption to local engagement in the formative stages, moving quickly to ...

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...

In July 2012 thousands of competitors from many nations arrive for the London Olympics, each striving to be a champion. Oh, the drive, resolve, heartache and pain. Our capital will be taken over, the press will both celebrate and criticize events; sponsorship deals will soon dominate the results. The men and women who are competing will have trained for many months or years, striven nationally and internationally, fighting hard for places in their teams. What drives them? This short paper is a personal perspective, unashamedly anecdotal, looking at some of the driving forces behind my own endeavours. I have spent a lifetime climbing mountains, with a focus on the exploration of remote regions. I also deal here with the physiological and medical challenges that high altitude mountaineering poses, and discuss its risks.

‘ 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...

This article provides a theological analysis of modern professional sport, in particular the modern Olympic Games, in light of some of C. S. Lewis's writings on pride and humility. This is prefaced with an analysis of the nature and character of "human competition" in the sporting context and its potential positive and negative consequences. We conclude by suggesting that the modern professional sports institution and the Olympic movement, while possessing many positive and enriching attributes, requires "wholesale spiritual rehabilitation" due in part to both individual and national pride. However, we also believe that the modern Olympic Games that are characterized by passionate international sports competition, has many positive and life-affirming attributes and that there is hope of a lasting "legacy," the prayer of Lord Coe!

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...