Do the Olympic Games really live up to their glowing reputation? As the biggest global sport mega-event, the Olympics command public attention, while Olympic mythology obscures their underlying function as a profit-making business. Unlike terms such as 'Olympic movement' and 'Olympic family', the concept of 'Olympic industry' focuses on sport as an economic and political enterprise, with its beneficiaries including sponsors, media rights holders, developers, and politicians. Negative impacts on host cities disproportionately threaten the lives and well-being of disadvantaged minorities. Citizens' Olympic resistance campaigns address a range of human rights abuses, while recent athlete activism also focuses on the doping problem and the sexual abuse of girls and women. Female athletes with 'differences of sexual development' face discriminatory gender policies that disqualify them from women's events. All of these issues are analysed through a feminist, anti-racist lens.
Price: $25.99
Pages: 264
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Imprint: Emerald Publishing Limited
Series: SocietyNow
Publication Date:
15 April 2020
ISBN: 9781838677763
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
SPORTS & RECREATION / General, Society & Social Sciences, SPORTS & RECREATION / Olympics & Paralympics, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Physical
Lenskyj's contribution to the world of sports is an important, sharp and brave reminder that sport is political, that athletes are humans with rights not instruments for others to (mis)use for the benefit of themselves. We must never forget that as long as sports, in this case the Olympic industry, impacts the lives of its practitioners negatively, it needs to develop in line with the societal demands, regulations and laws and not to construct a sphere of its own.
Helen Jefferson Lenskyj is Professor Emerita, University of Toronto. Her work as a researcher and activist on gender and sport issues began in the 1980s, and her critiques of the Olympic industry include Inside the Olympic Industry and Olympic Industry Resistance.
Chapter 1. Introduction and Background
Chapter 2. Olympic Resistance
Chapter 3. 'Sport and Politics Don't Mix'
Chapter 4. Olympic Industry Impacts
Chapter 5. Reform: 'To Restore Reputation'
Chapter 6. Athletes, Politics, and Protest
Chapter 7. 'Educating Youth Through Sport'
Chapter 8. Athletes' Rights, Athletes' Lives
Chapter 9. Gender Policies: Challenges and Responses
Chapter 10. The Olympics: 'Not a Welfare Program but a Business Venture'