Jon Pack is a Brooklyn-based photographer whose work has been exhibited in galleries in the US and Europe, and has appeared on book covers from publishers including Simon & Schuster and Random House. His previous projects include the limited-edition book Out There; That Thing We Call Nature.

Part III City Portraits -- 13 Berlin 1936 -- 14 Mexico City 1968 -- 15 Munich 1972 -- 16 Sydney 2000 -- 17 Athens 2004 -- 18 Beijing 2008 -- 19 London 2012 -- 20 Rio de Janeiro 2016 -- 21 Tokyo 2020 -- References -- Index

This volume provides an overview of the changing relationship between cities and the Olympic Games, starting from the year 1896. Blending critical conceptual insight with grounded case studies, this book, divided into three parts, explores the historical experience of staging the Olympics from the point of view of the host city.

Hosting the Olympic Games reveals the true costs involved for the cities that hold these large-scale sporting events. It uncovers the financing of the Games, reviewing existing studies to evaluate the costs and benefits, and draws on case study experiences of the Summer and Winter Games from the past forty years to assess the short- and long-term urban legacies for host cities. Written in an easily accessible style and format, it provides an in-depth critical analysis into the franchise model of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and offers an alternative vision for future Games. This book is an important contribution to understanding the consequences for the host cities of Olympic Games.

In 2013 and 2014, some of Massachusetts' wealthiest and most powerful individuals hatched an audacious plan to bring the 2024 Summer Olympics to Boston. Like their counterparts in cities around the world, Boston's Olympic boosters promised political leaders, taxpayers, and the media that the Games would deliver incalculable benefits and require little financial support from the public. Yet these advocates refused to share the details of their bid and only grudgingly admitted, when pressed, that their plan called for billions of dollars in construction of unneeded venues. To win the bid, the public would have to guarantee taxpayer funds to cover cost overruns, which have plagued all modern Olympic Games. The United States Olympic Committee (USOC) chose Boston 2024's bid over that of other American cities in January 2015-and for a time it seemed inevitable that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) would award the Games to Boston 2024. No Boston Olympics is the story of how an ad hoc, underfunded group of diverse and engaged citizens joined together to challenge and ultimately derail Boston's boosters, the USOC, and the IOC. Chris Dempsey was cochair of No Boston Olympics, the group that first voiced skepticism, demanded accountability, and catalyzed dissent. Andrew Zimbalist is a world expert on the economics of sports, and the leading researcher on the hidden costs of hosting mega-events such as the Olympics and the World Cup. Together, they tell Boston's story, while providing a blueprint for citizens who seek to challenge costly, wasteful, disruptive, and risky Olympic bids in their own cities.

Rather than interpreting the Olympics as primarily a sporting event of international or national significance, this book understands the Games as a civic project for the host city that serves as a catalyst for a variety of urban interests over a period of many years from the bidding phase through the event itself. Traditional Olympic studies have tended to examine the Games from an outsider's perspective or as something experienced through the print media or television. In contrast, the focus presented here is on the dynamics within the host city understood as a community of interacting individuals who encounter the Games in a variety of ways through support, opposition, or even indifference but who have a profound influence on the outcome of the Games as actors and players in the Olympics as a drama. Adopting a symbolic interactionist approach, the book offers a new interpretive model through which to understand the Olympic Games by exploring the relationship between the Games and residents of the host city. Key analytical concepts such as framing, dramaturgy, the public realm, and the symbolic field are introduced and illustrated through empirical research from the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games, and it is shown how social media and shifts in public opinion reflected interaction effects within the city. By filling a clear lacuna in the Olympic Studies canon, this book is important reading for anybody with an interest in the sociology of sport, urban studies, event studies or urban sociology.

Providing a full overview of the changing relationship between cities and the Olympic events, this substantially revised and enlarged edition builds on the success of its predecessor. Its coverage takes account of important new scholarship as well as adding reflections on the experience of staging Beijing 2008 and Vancouver 2010, the state of preparations for London 2012, and the plans for the Games scheduled for Sochi in 2014 and Rio de Janeiro 2016. The book is divided into three parts that provide overviews of the urban legacy of the four component Olympic festivals, systematic surveys of five key aspects of activity involved in staging the Olympics and ten chronologically arranged portraits of host cities. As controversy over the growing size and expense of the Olympics continues, this timely assessment of the Games’ development and the complex agendas that host cities attach to the event will be essential reading for urban and sports historians, urban geographers, planners and all concerned with understanding the relationship between cities and culture. Olympic Cities is one of the Routledge books of the month for December 2010