Here is a link to an op-ed in Al JAzeera that I wrote with Professor Jules Boykoff of Pacific University in the USA.
"The International Olympic Committee recently convened in Buenos Aires, where it chose Tokyo to host the 2020 Summer Games, restored wrestling to the Olympic programme, and elected German fencing champion Thomas Bach as its new president. Amid the frenzy and spectacle, it would be easy to forget that the prior week, the IOC quietly concluded a pre-Games inspection of Rio de Janeiro, host of the 2016 Olympics.
The IOC's Coordination Commission rehearsed the predictable pabulum about Rio's "strong, solid progress" towards delivering on legacy projects. It soft-pedalled its criticism, urging Rio "to focus on its top priorities", such as venue building and infrastructure construction. But below the shiny surface of the IOC's official imprimatur, serious trouble lurks as the country prepares to host both the 2016 Olympics and the 2014 football World Cup finals.
And a second article that I wrote regarding the empty notion of sustainability and the Rio 2016 Olympic project (Gaffney, C. Between Discourse and Reality: The Un-Sustainability of Mega-Event Planning. Sustainability 2013, 5, 3926-3940):
The zero-sum nature of mega-event hosting encourages cities to escalate investment with an eye towards convincing event rights holders that a positive outcome will result. The discursive frameworks of “legacy” and “sustainability”, the global competition to attract events and the compressed event horizon make for mega-event preparation regimes that may seriously compromise long-term urban planning agendas in mega-event hosts. By examining the sustainable urban planning literature, the discursive frameworks of sustainability in the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the discursive framing of the Rio 2016 bid, this paper will examine the Olympic Golf project being implemented in Rio de Janeiro. Through this case study the paper argues that unless mega-event rights holders change their candidacy and selection processes, these events will inevitably be detrimental to their hosts
More elephant hunts coming soon but I need to go find some more ammunition.
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