By announcing Paris and Los Angeles as the hosts of the 2024 and 2028 Summer Olympic Games, respectively, the International Olympic Committee confirmed at their congress in Lima what many Olympic aficionados had known for a long time. Unlike the heart-stopping moments of brilliance we associate with the Olympics, there was no competition. Paris and Los Angeles had survived longest in a bidding process that had seen numerous cities pull out of the process following pressure from grassroots opponents of Olympic bids. With so few potential candidates for the 2024 Games, the IOC decided to pin Los Angeles down to hosting the 2028 Games to save the potential embarrassment of not having a host.

Boston, initially the US Olympic Committee’s preferred host city, dropped out before the race had even begun after an impressive campaign of grassroots resistance. Hamburg held a referendum on hosting the Olympics, with citizens decisively rejecting the Games. Rome elected an anti-Olympic Mayor who subsequently withdrew that city’s candidature. In Budapest, political support for the bid fell away sharply as voters scrutinised proposals, leading to withdrawal. The Winter Games have fared no better, with a plethora of cities dropping out from the last round of bidding, leaving the IOC forced to choose a host city with no snow for 2022.

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Why? The answer is surprisingly simple: there are tangible drawbacks for host cities including humungous costs and the degradation of human rights through evictions and militarisation, to be weighed against mostly ephemeral benefits about pride and inspiration. From a policy perspective, as citizens and mayors of countless cities around the world have decided, hosting the Olympics is a terrible decision.

Rio de Janeiro serves a graphic reminder of everything that can go wrong. The so-called “wonderful city” was ravaged by hosting the Olympic Games. Schools, hospitals and even policing were underfunded as the Olympics sucked money from government budgets during Brazil’s worst recession in over a century. The State University of Rio de Janeiro, once the fifth best university in Brazil and a key driver of social justice, has been closed due to a lack of funding. Often, the burden has fallen on those who can least afford it, residents of Rio’s favelas who see “pain, death, and despair” as their Olympic legacy.

Tokyo, due to host the next Summer Games in 2020, provides little aid for those searching for a reason to host the Games. Preparations for the Olympics have already been accused of violating the right to housing for poor and elderly residents. Budgets are spiralling out of control, exactly as is repeatedly predicted by leading economists of mega-events such as Andrew Zimbalist and Bent Flyvberg.

The Olympics are a prime example of what Jules Boykoff calls Celebration Capitalism: property developers and investors get filthy rich off the backs of the poor while those of us who might normally object are swept along in the bright lights of sporting glamour. During the contest to host the 2024 Games, however, activists around the world have successfully placed the murky underworld of Olympic hosting in the spotlight.

In Paris, activists have raised objections about the inadequacy of the proposed Olympic budget, which ignores security spending and pushes money toward white elephant stadia even as the government considers cutting health, education and transport budgets. Any infrastructure benefits brought by Olympic investment, activists perceptively note, will serve the interests of the opaque, tax-exempt Swiss-based IOC, not Parisians. This will all happen with no choice given to Parisians: their voices will be marginalised and new laws limiting free expression and sweeping aside environmental protections will be passed.

The story is frighteningly similar in Los Angeles, where opponents of the Games have criticised massive spending on elite sport during a housing crisis. Fears of police brutality and spiralling housing prices have been routinely overlooked by the city council. Mayor Eric Garcetti has refused to make Los Angeles a sanctuary city, as hosting the Olympics will require him to cooperate with the Federal government, thus giving President Trump an unlikely ally in deeply liberal California.

In the late 1970’s, the IOC faced a similar dearth of willing host cities following terrorism in Munich (1972) and eye-watering debt accrued in Montreal (1976). Los Angeles rode to the rescue in 1984, persuading the IOC to change their strict rules for host cities, rewarding them by posting the only profit ever recorded by an Olympic host. In doing so, LA 1984 transformed the Olympics into a thoroughly neoliberal event. Cities began queuing up to host the world’s premier sporting event again. All was well for the IOC.

Los Angeles’s current bid, and to a lesser extent Paris’, has played to this potential to transform the Olympics for the next Olympic Games. As Jules Boykoff points out, “the Olympics need Los Angeles and Paris much more than either city needs the Olympics”, yet politicians seem unwilling to extract further concessions from the IOC, which extends its tax-exempt status to sponsors such as Coca-Cola and Samsung while contributing a relatively meagre proportion of the cost of hosting the event.

The much-vaunted concessions LA politicians secured in exchange for agreeing to host the Games four years later than planned is a case in point. The IOC agreed to provide an additional $300 million dollars of broadcast and sponsorship revenues to the cost of hosting, compared to Paris. Considering London 2012 cost British taxpayers over $30 billion dollars, this relatively meagre $300 million dollars is unlikely to make the difference between profit and deficit.

While there may be potential for these cities to transform the Olympics, it is unlikely they will make them better for host populations in the long-run. Being the only city prepared to host the Games does allow organisers to demand concessions from the IOC. But the Olympic problems of cost overruns, evictions, militarisation and environmental destruction are not likely to go away unless politicians make much bolder demands. In what could be regarded as an unfortunate tautology, any city which values its citizens, environment and budget enough to truly transform the Olympics for the better, would be unwilling to bid for the event in the first place under the current rules.

Adam Talbot is a doctoral researcher at the University of Brighton. His research focuses on social movements and Rio 2016. His wider interests include urban politics, mega-events, Latin America and human rights. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamTalbotSport

In his book, Diversity and Inclusion in Sport Organizations, Cunningham highlights that the sport industry has historically been a male oriented space where men have continuously held positions of power, subjugating women’s ability to participate and take positions of authority. Despite this historical power imbalance, research also shows that better business decisions are made when a diverse group of both men and women are a part of the process. Further, having more women represented in leadership roles can ultimately help an organization progress and evolve in a successful direction.

Even where women do hold jobs in sport organizations, they tend to be underrepresented in high ranking positions. In sport, the glass ceiling for women is potentially lower than in other fields, and there are few women who advance to senior roles within sport organizations. Women have slowly started to become a part of the sport industry fabric in organizational positions, but there is still a long way to go with regard to representation and leadership.

In light of these inequities, The Sport Women of Tampa (SWOT) was founded as a student organization in the spring of 2015 at The University of Tampa, Florida. SWOT was founded on the hope that the organization would create a supportive environment for women across the undergraduate population interested in pursuing their passion in the sport industry. Building on this founding principle, the organization provides the opportunity for students who identify as female to come together and share experiences, offer advice, and form a supportive network for one another.

The mission of SWOT is to help women interested in pursuing a career in the sport industry to:

• Develop networking skills to become strong female leaders in the sport industry
• Acquire knowledge and insight about gender inequalities through seminars
• Learn about the lived experiences of professional women, who work in predominately male industries
• Volunteer time and create mentorship opportunities for all members
• Promote and support equal opportunities for all within the arena of sport

SWOT hopes to inspire, connect, and create a network of highly motivated women who not only want to break the glass ceiling, but help others to follow. We want to lead by example and also learn from the previous experiences of others. For example, diversity with regard to gender requires greater engagement and progress at the executive level. To get to that level, there needs to be a cooperative environment in which women are able to build solid relationships and advocate for one another in their progression through the sport work landscape.

The field of sport management is relatively new to higher education and has only recently begun to flourish as an interdisciplinary degree for students seeking careers in sport. However, many of these programs attract more men than women, and the sport management major is numerically dominated by men. This is not a new trend, and in fact, the underrepresentation of women working in the sport industry is a direct reflection of the number of women who identify as sport management majors. In the case of the University of Tampa, the majority of students enrolled in the Sport Management major at the university identify as male, even though the University of Tampa female to male ratio is 55 females to 45 males.

To help address this situation, SWOT members work for various professional, semi-professional, intercollegiate, and stand-alone sport programs in the Tampa Bay area; the men in these organizations are usually in positions in which they are the students’ supervisors. The majority of SWOT members hold positions in ticket sales, community relations, or game-day operations. All have a passion to work in the sport industry, but few have had the opportunity to work outside of the previously highlighted areas.

The sport industry involves working long hours and working closely with colleagues to execute an event or game day. Working in the sport industry is not a 9-to-5 job. One may work nights, early mornings, weekends, holidays, in addition to office hours held during the normal business week. In some cases, a SWOT member may sometimes be the only woman who is working during this time.

The goal of SWOT is to instill confidence in our members so they are comfortable in these spaces, where they are underrepresented, but still have the fortitude to thrive and let their voices be heard when it comes to decision-making matters. We want to increase the presence of women in the sport industry and in positions at the executive level. In order to do so, we must equip our members with knowledge and understanding of the various challenges they may face in a male dominated field.

We hope that as our members graduate and move on in their career, they will establish their own version of SWOT within their selected graduate programs or sport organizations. Having chapters of women and sport organizations, on college campuses and in the sport industry; will allow women in the male dominated field, to connect and support each other nationally and internationally.

Long term, we hope to create a ripple effect in which there is an increased awareness of what it means to be a woman in the sport industry and how important it is to have women represented in all aspects of daily life. We hope also that other such organiaations would be willing to engage in collaborative relationships, and would encourage other staff or student organiaations to contact us for any advice on establishing codes of practice for a women’s organiaation.

Nalani Butler is an Assistant Professor of Sport Management at The University of Tampa, where she is also the faculty advisor for the Sports Women of Tampa (SWOT). Her research areas in the discipline of sport studies include: globalization and sport, sport labor migration, and sport for development. She is available on Twitter @DrNalaniB and Instagram @DrNalaniB

Piece assisted by:

Haley Wolstenholm is a sophomore at the University of Tampa, majoring in Sports Management. She is the current Treasurer and President-elect for Sports Women of Tampa. Haley has served as a volunteer for game-day operations and events. She currently does volunteer work for the Tampa Bay Rowdies.

Emma Hutchings is currently a junior at The University of Tampa studying Human Performance as her major and minoring in Sport Management. As a Co-President of Sport Women of Tampa (SWOT) she provides insights on gender inequality issues in the sports industry by attending conferences, speaking at events and participating in volunteering opportunities.

The migration of professional athletes has entered the news once more in recent weeks. In Chinese association football (soccer), quotas on the number of foreign athletes permitted on the pitch have been implemented to curb the boom in spending which has attracted players such as Carlos Tevez, Oscar, Hulk, Asamoah Gyan and Graziano Pellè to the Chinese Super League. In further high profile news, freshly inaugurated President Donald Trump’s use of executive orders to restrict the movement of people from predominantly Muslim countries could affect the movement of athletes into the North American territory.

This executive action led the NBA to request clarity on the potential impact on the league, with the Toronto Raptors in Canada creating potential visa issues for a handful of franchises and players. Similarly, the move caused Great British Olympian and Somalian refugee, Mo Farah, to question his ability to travel in and out of the US having moved his family from London to Portland in 2011 as part of Nike’s Oregon Project.

While Trump’s policy on migrants links explicitly to the post-911 era and a hardening of political discourse towards migration in the United States, it also highlights the spectre of moral panic on both sides of the political divide. For example, since Mo Farah’s release of his social media statement, the UK Home Office have confirmed that any ban would not apply to Farah as a British national. Such flash points often ignore the prominent role of overseas quotas, restriction, visa applications and their circumvention in the experiences of migration for many athletes. As Thomas Carter highlighted in his 2011 paper on the relationship between migrant athletes and state apparatus, the relationship between athletes and these aspects of sport migration processes are a significant aspect of day-to-day experiences for many. In British sport, the relationship between athletes, national and supranational boundaries has consistently been experienced through the Kolpak Ruling, which has impacted both codes of rugby and most notably cricket due to the prominence of the sport in South Africa. This ruling allows citizens of countries which are part of European Union Association Agreements the same rights to freedom of movement enjoyed by citizens of EU member states and has been a feature of the EU sporting landscape since the ruling in 2003.

The role of restriction and circumvention in the relationship between migrants and institutional structures was compared to the operation of a tap by Stephen Castles. It is within this space my doctoral research resides, centering on labour migration in professional basketball. Within basketball the role of quotas is felt by players around the globe as national federations grapple with tensions between creating high quality sporting spectacles and preserving space for players who are eligible for federations’ representative teams in tournaments such as the FIBA World Cup and Olympics.

Quotas are intended to diminish the impact of North American athletes and are a consistent feature of the basketball landscape, with federations altering this mandate as they see fit. The operation of professional leagues, state border controls and clubs both alongside and against individuals further complicates the lives of mobile athletes seeking to prolong their careers, navigating not only the tiered complications of nation-state visa requirements, but also the league requirements while competing with other athletes for a precious few spots.

One example of the spaces athletes can move to which employ such policies is the British Basketball League (BBL). The BBL provides one of a seemingly endless number of professional options available to athletes searching for a professional basketball contract. Athletes attracted to the BBL encompass not only those who have come through the highly visible North American college system, but also those who have come through academy routes both in Europe and beyond. The BBL, while not at the forefront of European basketball, highlights a league with a high negative balance between exports and imports of basketball players (there are far more players coming into Britain than there are British players leaving to play abroad), and as such feels the strain of attempting to maintain and increase nationally available players to fulfil Olympic funding requirements. The need to be mindful of the implementation of overseas player quotas is therefore significant and highlights the day-to-day reality of migratory boundaries. This situation has led the league to implement a maximum of five overseas players per game with only three able to play on a non-EEA visa.

Within these contexts, overseas players seeking contracts are frequently viewed as outsiders who enhance clubs’ performances but lack meaningful interest in the local area or the team and impinge on opportunities for locally developed players. Mark Falcous and Joseph Maguire conducted research into fans’ attitudes towards players at Leicester Riders. Falcous and Maguire found that, though there were a variety of attitudes, responses were mediated through a local lens concerning players’ effect and commitment to the local area. Players are wanted as a talented necessity for the club’s status, though questioned seemingly for commitment to the local ambitions which drive overseas quotas shaping their experiences.

In trying to negotiate such boundaries the acquisition of dual-nationality status can be amongst athletes’ key considerations in the pursuit of a professional basketball career. Within my research, eight players had dual-nationality status. Their access to countries had different permutations dependent on the situation they were entering. Dual-nationality status for players was often garnered through parental routes, with players trading on the wider display of sovereignty offered to family members. Players in this situation are at the behest of quotas, but dual-nationality status is a way in which players avoid quotas or manipulate routes through and across state and sporting boundaries. Such responses to quotas by athletic migrants betray key ambiguities in attempts to comprehend the mobility of athletes, and the regularity with which restrictions are faced.

As the British government approach Brexit and consider the role of immigration in the process, the potential tightening of quotas and removal of freedom of movement status for EEA nationals will change this landscape. However, the experiences of the athletes in my research show the continuing background of restriction and circumvention is already a visible feature of athletic migrations. While flash points such as Trump’s EO, the Chinese government’s implementation of more stringent quotas and Brexit draw attention to these daily issues, the day-to-day reality is that the project of controlling the migration of athletes is ongoing, and the game of navigating such boundaries is one athletes will have to continue playing.

Christopher Faulkner has recently completed his PhD and is a sessional lecturer at the University of Worcester. His doctoral research focuses on the experiences of migrants in professional basketball. You can find him on Twitter @CJCFResearch

Six months ago, the world watched on in wonder as the 2016 Olympic Games opened with a colourful ceremony in Rio de Janeiro’s iconic Maracanã stadium. Just over two weeks of heart-stopping drama, superhuman performances, incredible feats of power and precision and one lying swimmer later, it was all over. Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, closed the Rio 2016 Olympic Games claiming that “history will talk about a Rio de Janeiro before and a much better Rio de Janeiro after the Olympic Games”.

Bach refers here to the legacy of the Games, a much touted phrase to describe the apparent benefits of hosting mega-events like the Olympics. All too often, the focus of discussions about Olympic legacies focus on the claimed positives, such as increased sporting participation, boosted visitor numbers and economic growth. Legacy should be extend to include the damage left in the wake of the Games. It should include the 80,000 people evicted from their homes, the 2,500 killed by police, and the massive public debt placing pressure on city services.

Thinking about this insidious legacy, what have been the big stories in Rio in recent months? It would be no surprise if you hadn’t heard anything, since most of the international press flew out of Rio just after the athletes. Even those who’d lived there for years were reassigned, with bureaus planning to relocate to São Paulo or Brasilia, where the economic and political stories are.

Golfing Graft

The Olympic Mayor, Eduardo Paes, has been in a spot of bother with the authorities after leaving office in October 2016. His assets have been frozen in relation to mismanagement of the contract for the construction of the Olympic golf course. While bringing golf back to the Olympics was heralded as a success for the IOC, the impacts of the event have been far from positive in Rio.

The environmental damage involved in building the golf course was similarly egregious. Course construction routinely involves damaging practices; these include deforestation, destruction of natural habitats and heavy use of chemicals. But despite these impacts, Rio’s Olympic organisers decided they needed to build a new course, ignoring the existing golf courses in the city. Golf courses require vast amounts of water to prepare, which was particularly difficult at the start of 2015 when Rio was experiencing a drought. The sprinklers stayed on, despite reports that some of Rio’s residents didn’t have access to water to drink. The Olympic show must go on it seems.

As if the potential impacts  couldn’t get any worse, the course was constructed on the Marapendi nature reserve. Given the difficulties this situation would normally entail, it is perhaps no surprise that Paes is charged with administrative impropriety for waiving the need for an environmental license. The real estate developers who won the contract to build the course were also given the public land and the right to build condominiums there as part of the deal. The legacy here is an exclusive golf course, a reduction of publicly owned assets, and a severely degraded environment.

Financial Failures

You may recall seeing the photo above just before that Games, when the State of Rio de Janeiro declared a state of emergency due to lack of funds. The State paid for most of the major Olympic construction costs and found itself overstretched.  Brazil’s economic crisis and a global dip in the price of oil, a major industry in the state, resulted in lower revenues and a huge budget deficit.

Of course, the Federal government stepped in to keep the Olympic show on the road – although the Paralympics were cut significantly. But now the Olympic stardust has moved on, and the federal government has no burning imperative to hand over more cash. Radical changes must be made, they said.

Perhaps one of the most striking proposals is the closure of the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Despite being ranked among the top universities in the country, budget cuts have put the university’s future in jeopardy. It seems that despite the lofty rhetoric of the IOC and educational bedrock of Olympism, the Olympic legacy in Rio will reduce educational opportunities.

Jules Boykoff’s Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games describes how the Olympics are used by governments to force through regressive changes with a  political urgency  created by the deadline for the event. The Olympics work in a similar way to the disaster capitalism Naomi Klein writes about in The Shock Doctrine, where disasters provide the same urgency. Here we see the one-two punch of celebration and disaster capitalism, as an illegitimate government forces through legislation to freeze public spending for the next twenty years due to levels of public debt.

Sporting Stumbles

Of course, if the Olympics leave one thing behind it’s modern stadia. And in Rio, there is no stadium quite like the Maracanã – the spiritual home of association football (soccer). Surely, in football-crazy Brazil, there would be no problems using these stadiums after the Games. The national stadium in Rio, renovated three times since 2000 at huge public expense, has been transformed from a theatre – temple even – of sport into a shopping mall.

Despite the blatant commercialisation of the stadium, it still cannot make a profit. Rio’s utility company recently switched off the power at the stadium due to unpaid bills. One of the major phenomena during the Games was the performance of the Brazilian women’s soccer team – cheered on even more than the men’s team at times. After the Games, any authority looking to secure a legacy had a solid foundation to build on. Instead, the CBF cut key programmes for the women’s game.

Not only has elite sport been stunted by the Games, local sporting facilities have been shut down. The Célio de Barros arena, a key venue for community sport, was gutted and threatened with demolition. This is just one example of Rio’s Olympics harming community sport for the sake of a 17-day elite competition.

Brazilians have an expression for things done for the benefit of foreigners masking the harsh reality of life for Brazil’s poor. They say it is “for the English to see”, an expression dating back to the abolition of the slave trade under pressure from British government. Many criticised the Olympics as being “for the English to see”, as the authorities covered up their problems. But the English aren’t looking any more.

And so the International Olympic Committee took the profits they made from the Games and scuttled away from Brazil, leaving the legacy in the hands of an unelected, corrupt president. Now they can be found lending legitimacy to the destruction of forests in South Korea and evicting the homeless in Meiji Park, Tokyo. Only time will tell what atrocities those five rings will be used to legitimise in Beijing.

Adam Talbot is a doctoral researcher at the University of Brighton. His research focuses on social movements and Rio 2016. His wider interests include urban politics, mega-events, Latin America and human rights. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamTalbotSport