Interviews - ALESDE

Sport in UK and the 2012 Olympic Games
Prof. Elizabeth Pike - University of Chichester

"On July 6th 2005, London was awarded the rights to host the 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games to become the first city to host the Summer Olympic Games three times. For some, this has been seen as the Games ‘coming home’: Pierre de Coubertin (often cited as the inspiration behind the revival of the Olympic Games) visited Much Wenlock in the UK in 1890 to meet the founder of the “Shropshire Olympics” for advice as he prepared to host the first of the Modern Olympic Games in 1896. In addition, the Paralympic Games are generally regarded as being grounded in the activities of Stoke Mandeville hospital in the UK, where wounded soldiers were rehabilitated from their war injuries in part through competitive sporting competitions. The mascots for the 2012 Games are Wenlock and Mandeville, named after these two significant locations.
However, the 2012 Games are not without controversy. The cost of hosting the Games quickly spiralled from the initial estimate of approximately £2.4 billion to more than £9 billion. Income for the Games is from a variety of sources: the British government, tax payers, a National Lotto and ticket sales. The USA television company NBC paid the International Olympic Committee US$1.181 billion for the rights to the London 2012 Olympic Games. There are sponsorship deals, with the Worldwide Partners including Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Samsung, and Visa; the London 2012 Official Partners including adidas, BP, British Airways, BT, EDF Energy, Lloyds TSB, Nortel and two London 2012 Official Supporters: Deloitte, Cadbury. However, the Games are taking place in a time of global recession and austerity measures, and there have been many financial cuts. For example, there has been a reduction of funding to non-Olympic sports by approximately £100 million, and reduction of £112 million to the arts in the UK.
There are additional controversies beyond funding. While London made a pledge to be a ‘Green Games’, there have been battles between local residents and facility developers as green land has been built on, and residents compulsorily evicted from their properties. Indeed, Hayes and Horne (2011) argue that the Olympics are a fundamentally unsustainable event.
Issues related to social inclusion, marginalisation and discrimination are also illustrated through the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Disabled athletes are relatively invisible in the UK, with less media coverage, lower levels of financial support, and fewer competitive opportunities. This is despite the fact that the British Paralympic team has been more successful in the medal tables than the British Olympic team in recent years.
When London won the 2012 Games, there was a promise that these would be the first ever gender-equitable Olympics. While the overall number of male and female athletes is moving toward equity, it remains the case that some events are not open to women (notably in boxing and cycling) – although it is also the case that there are no male competitions in synchronised swimming or rhythmic gymnastics. The situation is even more marked in the Paralympics with far fewer female than male competitors. Perhaps more significantly is the fact that women are not achieving equity in leadership and coaching positions on sports programmes in the UK. Of the UK national governing bodies of sport and the major British sports organisations, less than a third of Board members are women. The Anita White Foundation, recently launched at the University of Chichester, is continuing to progress the agenda for gender equity, with an archive of documents from the women and sport movement, and a fund to support women from developing countries to study at Chichester (see www.chi.ac.uk/awf).
Sports in the UK also have a long history of racial and ethnic prejudice, with men and women in all black and minority ethnic groups under-represented in terms of participation and management in most competitive sports. This is not always immediately apparent because the sports with the greatest television coverage in the UK are those where black athletes are often more visible (football, track and field athletics), but these represent only a very small minority of overall sports participation. There are also complex relations between the four home countries which constitute the United Kingdom – England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales – which sometimes combine into a united UK team, but in other sports play separately. In recent years, various sports have been the site of visible anti-racism campaigns which have spilled over into society more generally, perhaps most notably the Kick Racism Out Of Football campaign.
There is evidence that the pressures on athletes to perform at the highest level, such as in the Olympic and Paralympic Games, leads to cheating and other forms of deviant behaviour. There are innumerable examples of athletes over-conforming to a sporting ethic of dedication to sporting achievement at the sacrifice of their health and well-being (see Coakley and Pike, 2009). This includes the use of performance-enhancing drugs and other substances, risking life-threatening illnesses, severe injuries, and psychological damage. In addition, there are examples of violence on and off the field of play – sometimes strategically to gain an advantage over an opponent, but sometimes with no performance gain. In addition, violence among crowds of spectators is complex and may be celebratory, or planned confrontation between different groups, or even just random acts of violence with no easy explanation. The UK is also at the forefront of research into abuse, harassment and sexual assaults in sport, with a Child Protection in Sport Unit founded in 2001 to safeguard young people in sport.
The overall organisation of sport in the UK comes under the broad umbrella of the government’s Department for Media, Culture and Sport. The main sports bodies in the UK are quangos (quasi autonomous non-government organisations) that work in partnership with the government. For example, there is UKSport which manages and distributes public and lottery funds; regional sports councils for the home countries; and a powerful independent body in the form of the Central Council of Physical Recreation which lobbies on behalf of national governing and other bodies for the interests of sport and physical activity at all levels. There is also LOCOG, the organising committee for London 2012. Each of these bodies has their own website and resource base for those interested in learning more about sport in the UK. Furthermore, there is an online resource centre for the textbook Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies by Jay Coakley and Elizabeth Pike (published in 2009) which provides further information and materials."