Anthony Giddens • Sociology 5th Edition

Sociology, Sport and the Olympics

• Introduction
• Interview
• Additional materials

Across the world millions of people watched the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, dazzled by the participants’ sporting success. Perhaps you too were awed by the achievements of sportsmen and women like the swimmer Michael Phelps, who won a record-breaking 8 gold medals, or Usain Bolt, who broke the 100m and 200m sprint world records with such apparent ease?

The next Olympics will be held in London in 2012. The organisers’ vision for the games is to draw on the power of the Games to inspire change. Their plan is to use the Olympics to regenerate one of the poorest parts of the UK – Stratford in East London – and at the same time increase the commitment to sport across all social groups.

Critics argue that the Olympic Games have more complex costs and benefits, and that they are often misused for political purposes. Attention has been drawn, for example, to the way in which the Nazis tried to use the 1936 Berlin Games to demonstrate the superiority of the so-called Aryan race. Others point to the way in which the Chinese government recently tried to use the Olympics to divert attention from their human rights record, albeit with limited success. Similarly, the Olympics have been opposed on the grounds that they celebrate excessive nationalism and commercialisation, and reinforce the male domination of sport.

This month Anthony Giddens, himself an ardent football fan, assesses the role that events like the Olympics, and sport more generally, can play in bringing about social change. He also looks at the dark side of the Olympic competition.

 

Do you think the 2012 Olympic Games will really regenerate East London?

Sport is inspirational and aspirational. This gives it a fabulous transformative power, which I think can be harnessed to social objectives, including tackling problems like social exclusion. But while I am a strong believer in the redemptive power of sport it’s important to recognise that dealing with the kind of problems faced by people living in Stratford in East London is going to require much more than just building world-class sports facilities. The British government has introduced a plethora of initiatives which attempt to harness sport. For example, the current government have given their support to a scheme called Kickz, which provides regular sporting activities for young people in disadvantaged communities. One club I am familiar with, Charlton Athletic FC, runs a project in Eltham, where 44 per cent of offenders under the age of 16 say that they lack things to do, citing this as a cause of their offending. Fifteen per cent of children in Eltham are also classified as obese, and across the area health indicators are generally very poor. The power of sport means that schemes like Kickz can involve groups of young people it would otherwise be hard to reach, and give them new opportunities.

Unfortunately, there is limited evidence of whether initiatives like this actually work. It’s not that they have been shown to fail – simply that not enough evidence has been gathered yet on how they work in practice and what their long-term impact really is. If the 2012 Games are going to help people not just in Stratford but across the country to move out of poverty and social exclusion, we need to make sure we focus on much more than just the physical regeneration of the area. We need to develop a clear and well-evidenced set of initiatives that will last far beyond the Games themselves.

Is there an ugly side to the Olympics?

The Beijing Games were the most extraordinary spectacle, but critics have been right to draw attention to the Chinese government’s human rights record and the restrictions they place on their media. Many people criticised the amount of money that was spent on the Olympic spectacle, arguing that it would be better spent elsewhere. There were other costs to the Beijing Games. Facilities at the Olympic Park were reportedly superb, but a third of Beijing’s Old City was bulldozed to make way for the site.

The culture of the Olympics also breeds an obsession with success, which can have very negative consequences for the individual competitors. For example, over the years numerous athletes have been found to have taken performance enhancing drugs. Children under the age of sixteen are no longer allowed to compete in gymnastics events at the Olympics, partly in response to stories about the exploitation of child gymnasts in former Soviet-bloc countries. In countries where the state has total control of sport, the gruelling training regimes that athletes are subjected to can still be of concern.

There’s also a dark side to sport more generally. Although sport can unite communities, it can also divide them. I am thinking of conflicts between rival football supporters like Glasgow Rangers and Celtic, which have historically been split along religious lines, sometimes leading to extreme violence. Sports themselves often reflect class divisions – tennis, for example, has developed as a predominantly middle-class activity. Similarly, sport can embed gender inequalities. Men’s sporting events have a much higher status than women’s, which rarely receive coverage in the everyday media. Sport can also be an emblem of masculinity and aggressiveness – football is a good example of this. It can also perpetuate social constructions of masculinity and femininity – think of the way that female gymnastic events emphasise the competitors’ grace, and the way that the contestants wear sparkly make-up and tight costumes. The emphasis in the men’s competition tends to be on strength, and they don’t wear figure-hugging sequinned outfits.

But I believe strongly in the power of sport to intervene effectively in communities. During the recent Olympics, I think many people were proud of their country’s achievements, and the success of the individual athletes, and this gave them a sense of confidence and excitement about what might be achieved in the future. It’s hard to think of any other event which could create such widespread positivity, and we shouldn’t underestimate the value of that in promoting the general well-being of the nation.

 

Additional materials

Guide to researching sport in Sociology

In the boxed section on p. 929-931 of the 5th edition of Sociology you’ll find a detailed discussion of the pros and cons of staging the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in 2002. Although the Games were intended to boost urban regeneration, critics felt they only brought temporary, cosmetic changes to the area and that funds were diverted from other local services to fund the event. Could this be the fate of the 2012 London Olympics? How can the organisers ensure that the Olympics create a positive legacy for Londoners and the rest of the UK? To answer these questions, you might find it helpful to read Chapter 10 about poverty and social exclusion (p.340-380), and the sections on p. 928- 932 about other attempts to bring about urban regeneration.

Internet links

http://www.london2012.com/
Website for the London 1012 Olympic Games including the ‘brand video’ (http://www.london2012.com/about/our-brand/brand-video.php), which clearly encapsulates the organisers’ hope that the Games will inspire even the poorest members of society.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/system/topicRoot/Jesse_Owens_at_the_Berlin_Olymp/
The Times reports from the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games

http://www.olympic.org/
Official website of the International Olympic Committee.

http://www.le.ac.uk/so/css/resources/index.html
Free resources from the Centre for the Sociology of Sport at the University of Leicester - particularly strong on football. The Centre has now closed and so the site is not updated.

http://www.footballfoundation.org.uk/our-schemes/kickz/
Information on the Kickz programme mentioned by Anthony Giddens.

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Anthony Giddens — Sociology, 5th Edition