Olympic Games are sold to host city populations on the basis of legacy commitments that incorporate aid for the young and the poor. Yet little is known about the realities of marginalized young people living in host cities. Do they benefit from social housing and employment opportunities? Or do they fall victim to increased policing and evaporating social assistance? This book answers these questions through an original ethnographic study of young people living in the shadow of Vancouver 2010 and London 2012. Setting qualitative research alongside critical analysis of policy documents, bidding reports and media accounts, this study explores the tension between promises made and lived reality. Its eight chapters offer a rich and complex account of marginalized young people’s experiences as they navigate the possibilities and contradictions of living in an Olympic host city. Their stories illustrate the limits to the promises made by Olympic bidding and organizing committees and raise important questions about the ethics of public funding for such mega‐events. This book will be fascinating reading for anyone interested in the Olympics, sport and social exclusion, and sport and politics, as well as for those working in the fields of youth studies, social policy and urban studies.

Olympic Games are sold to host city populations on the basis of legacy commitments that incorporate aid for the young and the poor. Yet little is known about the realities of marginalized young people living in host cities. Do they benefit from social housing and employment opportunities? Or do they fall victim to increased policing and evaporating social assistance? This book answers these questions through an original ethnographic study of young people living in the shadow of Vancouver 2010 and London 2012. Setting qualitative research alongside critical analysis of policy documents, bidding reports and media accounts, this study explores the tension between promises made and lived reality. Its eight chapters offer a rich and complex account of marginalized young people’s experiences as they navigate the possibilities and contradictions of living in an Olympic host city. Their stories illustrate the limits to the promises made by Olympic bidding and organizing committees and raise important questions about the ethics of public funding for such mega‐events. This book will be fascinating reading for anyone interested in the Olympics, sport and social exclusion, and sport and politics, as well as for those working in the fields of youth studies, social policy and urban studies.

The summer Olympic Games are renowned for producing the world’s biggest single-city cultural event. While the Olympics and other sport mega-events have received growing levels of academic investigation from a variety of disciplinary approaches, relatively little is known about how such occasions are experienced directly by local host communities and publics. This ethnography examines the everyday policing of the London Borough of Newham in relation to the London 2012 Olympics. It explains how police defined, monitored, prioritized, contained and investigated ‘Olympic-related’ crime, and how ‘Olympic-related’ policing connected to the policing of Newham. The authors examine how the threat of terrorism impacted on the everyday policing of the 2012 Olympics, as well as the exaggeration of other threats to the Games – such as youth gangs – for political reasons. The book also explores local resistance to Olympic policing, and the legacy of the Games with regard to policing, local housing, demographics and social exclusion. Discussing the lessons that can be learned for the future staging of sporting mega-events, this book will appeal to scholars and students with interests in sport, policing, crime and criminology, mega-events, event management, urban studies, global studies and sociology.

Society is obsessed with categorising and treating individuals and groups according to their physical and non-physical differences, such as sex, gender, disability and race. This treatment can lead to the inclusion or exclusion of an individual from the tangible and intangible benefits of society. Where this practice becomes discriminatory, legal frameworks can protect human rights and ensure that people are treated with due respect for their similarities and differences. In a sporting context, the inclusion and exclusion of athletes based upon their differences is often a necessary part of the essence of competitive sporting activity, arranged around rules and categories that can have an unequal exclusionary impact on certain classes of individual. Dominant sporting cultures can also have exclusionary effects. This important and innovative book seeks to investigate the socio-legal and regulatory balance between inclusion and exclusion in competitive sport. It critically analyses a range of legal and non-legal cases concerning sport-specific inclusion and exclusion in the areas of sex, gender, disability and race, including those cases involving Oscar Pistorius, Caster Semenya and Luis Suarez, to identify the extent to which the law and sport adopt a justifiable and legitimate inclusive or exclusive approach to participation. The book explores national and international regulatory frameworks, identifying deficiencies and good practice, and concludes with recommendations for regulatory reform. Inclusion and Exclusion in Competitive Sport is important reading for anybody with an interest in the relationship between sport and wider society, sports development, sport management, sports law, or socio-legal studies.

A comprehensive, state-of-the-art reference collection, bringing together an authoritative and international line-up of scholars to examine key social and political issues related to the Olympics. An essential, 'one-stop' volume for a wide range of academics, students and researchers.

This book comprehensively describes, explains, critiques and refines our current perspectives of event leveraging and, in so doing, provides an analytic account of the subject area as a whole, as it concerns the strategic pursuit of attaining and magnifying benefits that derive from events. Encompassing all events including sport, cultural and business, it also covers all kinds of benefits that can be leveraged and lead to sustainability through triple-bottom-line assessment. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to cross boundaries and creates linkages among the parent disciplines (sport management; events, hospitality and tourism; leisure studies, parks and recreation) and general disciplines (management, marketing, sociology, anthropology, urban and regional planning). Building a truly global and transdisciplinary framework, the author provides direction and possibilities that can lead to new forms of leveraging, making this an excellent resource for researchers, practitioners and students interested in event management and policy, sport management, recreation and leisure, and hospitality, tourism and festival management.