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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labour market segregation continues to be a major barrier to gender equality, with the construction industry an example of a particularly male-dominated sector. Drawing on evidence from the Women into Construction project, established to increase women's opportunities to work on the construction of London's Olympic Park, the article argues that public procurement is a potentially powerful tool for breaking down gender segregation. This is particularly effective when new forms of responsive and reflexive legislation require private sector contractors to achieve social objectives. The authors argue that this could be made more effective through greater powers of engagement for stakeholders, including trade unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An issue commonly identified with the vast and costly developments that cities produce to host the Olympic Games is that they are prone to becoming 'white elephants' – obsolete or underused constructions that become cost burdens for cities. White elephants are particularly associated with some of the most recent Games of the twenty-first century, as reflected in accounts of 'limping' or obsolete venues in Sydney, Athens, Beijing, Rio and Sochi. This paper begins with a review of issues associated with spatial planning, architecture and planning process in the production of white elephants in Olympic history. It goes on to provide an historical account of London's efforts from 2002 to 2012 avoid attracting a repetition of the critique that followed earlier Olympics. Finally, it assesses its ongoing efforts and record over the six-year period from 2012 to 2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 14th Olympic Games in London that could not be held in 1940 and 1944 due to the World War II became a milestone in the history of the Turkish sport with the success of the Turkish wrestlers. The London Olympics in which the Turkish national team got the sixth place among 59 countries by winning 12 medals had widespread media coverage in the Turkish press. The success of the Turkish wrestlers in the Olympics made a nation, which did not enter the war but was exceedingly affected both politically and economically and the face of which did not smile for years burst into joy. That Nasuh Akar won the gold medal in freestyle, Gazanfer Bilge, Celal Atik, and Yaşar Doğu, Greco-roman Mehmet Oktav and Ahmet Kireççi from Mersin won the gold medal in the Olympics was announced under the headlines of “we became world champion” on the front pages of the newspapers. The newspapers sent reporters to London to follow the Olympics and conveyed the developments day by day with photographs. The fixtures of the Turkish wrestlers that ended with a victory were narrated with minute details. Hürriyet newspaper, which sent a photojournalist to London, tripled its circulation with its publications on the Olympics. In this study, the news, commentaries, and photos related to the 1948 London Olympics in Akşam, Cumhuriyet, Hürriyet, Vatan, and Ulus newspapers are examined.

Whereas traditionally hosting the Olympics was viewed as a top-down decision with little public input, public opinion is becoming more important in assessing and evaluating the merits of hosting the Games. Using bid documents from 2010 to 2020, the formal role that public opinion officially plays in the bid phase following the International Olympic Committee (IOC) procedures is examined. Public opinion in the preparation stage is reviewed, which demonstrates the problem of seeking simple declarations of support (Yes/No) that obfuscate important local issues (cost, traffic, urban priorities). Shifts in public opinion during the Games themselves, as well as one and four years after the Games, provide a new perspective on resident attitudes. Using retrospective data from Vancouver 2010 and London 2012, multivariate analysis demonstrates that participation in Olympic-related events (sporting and nonsporting) was the most important predictor of attitudes toward the Games and that concerns over costs were the only concerns that were justified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A day after the London 2012 Bid Committee succeeded in bringing the Olympic Games to Britain using the slogan “the world in one city”, a series of coordinated suicide bomb attacks occurred across London (7/7). In one day, Britain’s somewhat beleaguered multiculturalism went from prompting national celebrations to being decried as “dead” by politicians and commentators alike. Against a backdrop of the Committee’s success in July 2005 through to the end of the Games themselves in August 2012, this article analyses the social and political discourses and debates that ensued in relation to Britain’s multiculturalism. Exploring the metamorphosis of these discourses—using the analogous language of being alive, dead and zombie—this article reflects on the impact and legacy of the London Games on future understandings of multiculturalism. In doing so, this article argues that the everyday lived variety of multiculturalism will always be distinct and different from the political discourses appropriated—or rejected—by political actors.

This study examines the impact of a global sports event on gender representations in media reporting. Whereas previous research on gender, sport and media has been mainly concerned with sports events in the North American or Australian context, this study investigates the British media reporting before, during and after the London Olympics 2012. Our study follows the approach of corpusassisted discourse studies (CADS) and uses both quantitative and qualitative research procedures. The results reveal more balanced gender representations during the London Olympics in that the 'regular' biased associations were suppressed in favour of positive references to female achievements. However, little carry-though of the 'gains' was noted. Also, this study shows that the positive associations intersected with national sentiments and were used to celebrate the nation-state. At the same time, some subtle resistance was observed to accepting as 'truly' British the non-white athletes and those not born in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We seek to engage in this article the current debate in memory studies regarding the definition and nature of the phenomenon of collective memory. Using the controversy over Dow Chemical Corporation's sponsorship of the London Olympic stadium in 2012 as an example, we theorize memory as inherently logical--that is, as necessary to the maintenance of the overarching logics that govern the political and economic forms of a given society. We suggest that physical memory, or memory manifested in material, spatial objects such as architecture, plays an important role in both inciting remembrance and encouraging forgetfulness. We also make a case for distinguishing between three facets of memory: memory as a collective phenomenon, memory as an individual phenomenon, and the interface between the two where shifts in the processes of remembering and forgetting are made possible. In making this case, we synthesize theories of collective memory with a theory of political critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outcome bias and hindsight bias are related, but how exactly? To remedy theoretical ambiguity and non-existent directly relevant empirical research, we contrast an older idea (Baron & Hershey, 1988, J. Pers. Soc. Psychol., 54, 569) that sees outcome bias as partly mediated through hindsight bias with the idea that the two biases independently affect decision evaluations. In an Internet study of retrospections on the 2012 London Olympics, evaluations of the Games' success and its foreseeability had independent effects on evaluations of the International Olympic Committee's decision to award the Olympics to London; there was no evidence of mediation. Further theoretical discussion emphasizes the need to distinguish between a holistic assessment of decisions and a more specific assessment of the decision-making process in future outcome bias research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016 West Ham United Football Club is due to relocate from their ground in Upton Park, where they have been for a hundred years, to the Olympic Stadium in Stratford. It is argued that the move will generate multiple regenerative benefits at local, regional and national levels. Newham Council, an authority with a reputation for civic entrepreneurialism, envisages a ‘win, win, win’, by keeping the club in the borough, bolstering the status of the Olympic Park and securing housing on the site of the old stadium. Similar goals are envisaged by the Mayor of London and central government, keen to ensure an ‘Olympic Legacy’. However, other voices question the financial, policy and social integrity of the move. The Olympics have consumed a considerable amount of public money, but the stadium is due to be transferred to a private company (West Ham United Football Club) via a complex and controversial financial transaction. Claims of regeneration are challenged by contested interpretations of ‘affordable’ housing and broader concerns about the removal of an important local institution from its traditional, culturally diverse working class neighbourhood to a corporate-dominated environment where collective memories and identity may be trammelled by commercial interests. This paper critically interrogates the orthodoxy of the sport-regeneration discourse and argues that important socio-geographic, cultural and policy issues are silenced and threatened by the commercially driven rhetoric of ‘legacy’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Going against the grain of Olympic celebrations, Iain Sinclair warned against the disastrous consequences of the Grand Project in Ghost Milk. Instead of the promised regeneration, he could only foresee waste, contamination and the erasure of local culture, while predicting that the brand new Olympic superstructure would soon turn into ruins. Sinclair documents the legacy of a lost place, mourning the annihilation of sheds and familiar haunts. Sinclair engages with modern art, pitting Kapoor against Gormley, to demystify the Olympic epic. He maps the failure of other significant grand projects and former Olympic parks, using psychogeographic drift and the motif of the Northwest Passage, to articulate dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the London 2012 Games Muslim women from twenty-eight countries competed in over twenty different Olympic sporting events. In this paper, we critique online and print news articles, op-ed pieces and radio and television reports produced about these women athletes. We focus specifically on mediated representations that were constructed before and during the Games, and which originated and circulated across what is commonly referred to as “the West” (referring here to North America, Canada, Australia and parts of Western Europe). The aim is to ascertain what was considered newsworthy in relation to “Muslim sportswomen,” and what this reveals about popular mediated understanding of Muslim sports/women. Ahmed's (2000) discussion of ‘strange encounters’ is used as an analytical framework to make sense of the ways in which Muslim sportswomen, their sporting bodies and their presence at the Olympic Games was, typically, discussed, defined and represented to Western audiences through a manifold process of constant ‘Othering’. Emphasis is placed on exposing the underlying intentions of the authors/writers and contextualizing the relations of power, bias and subjectivity through which female Muslim athletes competing at London 2012 were mis/represented as strange, incompetent and out-of-place. By demonstrating the extent to which orientalist thinking continues to infiltrate contemporary western discussions on Islam and Muslim women, findings in this paper strengthen not only what Ahmed calls an ‘ontology of strangeness’ but also add to and lend further support to the work of post-colonial feminists, feminist media studies scholars and sociologists of sport. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on the example of the London Olympics 2012 to argue that a new 'realistic' politics of good governance and output-focused private sector delivery now dominates sustainability policy thinking. It is a politics that makes a series of normative claims and promises based on a pragmatic and non-ideological approach to sustainability. Its advocates claim that it converts the lofty ideals and aspirations of utopian sustainability into tangible, verifiable and output-based delivery mechanisms. The discussion examines the governance arrangements that were put in place for the Games and the ways in which sustainability objectives were defined, institutionalised and mobilised by hybrid public and private actors. It outlines some of the wider impacts of this new development model and its implications for thinking about sustainability planning elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global events such as London's 2012 Olympic Games raise questions about the ways in which embedded political arrangements take their shape from relationships that stretch across and beyond urban boundaries. In this article, the urban politics that we wish to capture is not one that is merely located in the city, but rather one that has to constantly take into account the mediated demands folded (as it were) into the urban arena. In the first part of the article, the corporate politics of an Olympic-related urban regeneration are outlined and then considered, first as a staged setting for interaction, a kind of placeless political engagement, and then as a more embedded spatial politics that takes into account the leverage of networked groups acting within and beyond the city. Following that, we explore the politics of regeneration when campaign groups and alternative coalitions of interest raise their own political demands by drawing on references outside of their immediate urban area and attempt to steer political dialogue in ways that extend the reach of urban politics. The urban politics at stake in this context, we argue, appears to work more through topology than a series of mapped connections; through actors registering their presence in ways that often dissolve the tension between inside and outside rather than define it in terms of separate political spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Twitter is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms in the sport industry, few studies have examined how Twitter messages influence sport fans' perception levels. To examine the effects of Twitter messages and user sources, a 2 (message valences: positive or negative toward the referee's decision) ? 2 (user sources: professional or non-professional) between-subjects design was employed. The results of the analyses of variance (ANOVA) revealed that Twitter messages had significant effects on sport fans' information processing. However, there were no significant user source effects on source evaluation. Professional sport journalists and non-professional writers were perceived to be equally reliable and likeable. Moreover, sport fans' cognition levels were differently shaped by types of message. Induced attitudes by the messages were transferred to the related topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 controversies between South Korea and Japan are reproduced, intensified and exacerbated by media reporting of international sports events. In South Korea, insult was added to injury by the fact that IOC's disapproval of Park's behaviour was contrasted in the South Korean media and by the public with the IOC's silence regarding the Japanese gymnastics team's uniform emblazoned with the ‘Rising Sun’ flag. The evidence from the incident is clear. Mega-sports events can be inflammatory occasions for the expression of hostile and heated political expression. Nowhere is this more the case than in East Asia with its long history of fierce national animosities and memories of national hostilities and humiliations. Throughout East Asia, international sport has become a potent medium for perpetuating painful memories! [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The various ‘global events’ China has hosted in recent years, most notably the Beijing Olympics, have sparked debate on the country's projection of soft power and invited easy conclusions that China's global public diplomacy has successfully seduced the world via its rich traditional culture and astounding modernisation. A comparison with the London Olympic Games, however, would suggest otherwise. Not only do the two Games differ in relation to the cultural ingredients combined to create overarching themes, they also reveal divergent public diplomacy strategies pursued by the host countries and cities. China's well-orchestrated and nearly infallible debut reveals its adherence to a top-down centre-driven approach that seeks to project the values and messages desirable to the governing authorities. The British approach, in contrast, transcends the elitist tendency by involving a wider set of actors within and without the government for clauses that extend past elites' interests. As a result, although London's Games were less ‘speculator’ than those in Beijing in presentation, the former's public diplomacy legacy may prove more lasting and likely to gain the admiration of the rest of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 controversies between South Korea and Japan are reproduced, intensified and exacerbated by media reporting of international sports events. In South Korea, insult was added to injury by the fact that IOC's disapproval of Park's behaviour was contrasted in the South Korean media and by the public with the IOC's silence regarding the Japanese gymnastics team's uniform emblazoned with the ‘Rising Sun’ flag. The evidence from the incident is clear. Mega-sports events can be inflammatory occasions for the expression of hostile and heated political expression. Nowhere is this more the case than in East Asia with its long history of fierce national animosities and memories of national hostilities and humiliations. Throughout East Asia, international sport has become a potent medium for perpetuating painful memories! [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 ensure sustainable outcomes after the Games. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 think to a global consensus on key political issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 athletes. Hungary is celebrating the year of its third London Games with a democratic system in the background, built up from 1989, and a new Constitution adopted in 2011. Furthermore, the Hungarian Sport Act was renewed in 2012, due to which the Hungarian Olympic Committee has gained increased power, which might provide new ways of solving the financial problems within Hungarian elite sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to Olympic organizers' claims about the London 2012 Games as a celebration for all, we recount the experiences of low-income and marginally housed young people as experiencing exclusion from the benefits of the Games being held in their neighbourhood. Drawing on qualitative methods with young people living in the ethnically diverse and economically deprived Olympic host borough of Newham, we focus on public space and its limitations in the context of the 2012 Games. The article discusses the sense conveyed by young people of their neighbourhood being made beautiful for visitors, but of themselves being overly policed and subject to Olympic-related dispersal orders. We conclude by querying for whom is public space made available during the Olympic Games, suggesting that the benefactors are not economically marginalized young people living in the shadow of the Games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article comments on the increasing number of written works and studies related to the field of cosmopolitan memory. It states that collective memory can be viewed as transcending the traditional perception towards nation state. According to the author, such transformation can be viewed as a result of international processes concerning deteriorialization of culture and politics.

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 a mature stage in which engagement is rebuilt around a changed institutional framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the authors in this study was to predict the mean swim time of the top eight swimmers in swim events at the 2012 Olympic Games based upon prior Olympic performances from 1972 through 2008. Using the mean top eight time across all years, a best fit power curve [time = a × yearb] was calculated and used to predict the finish time of the finalists for each event. Every event except the women's 100 breaststroke is predicted to be slower in 2012 than it was in 2008. However, the results of the 2008 swimming competition were shown to be biased, likely caused by the now banned “tech suits.” The authors hypothesize that the 2012 Olympic performances will realign with the prediction curves, thus demonstrating the reliability and sensitivity of the model and further confirming the “suit bias” of 2008. Final conclusions will be dependent upon the athletes' performances at the 2012 Games. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]