The Future of the Olympics
While we are still being bewildered by the fantastic success different athletes are achieving in beautiful sites built for the London Olympics, some are already looking up to the future of the Games. Only in the last 12 years we have witnessed four incredible Olympic shows, held respectively in Sydney in 2000, Athens in 2004, Beijing 2008 and the currently in London. Only one of these was held in a ‘non-western’ country, both from the political as well as cultural point of views.
If Beijing inevitably pops in your mind, when you try to judge which one of the four has been the most spectacular, it should actually make you wonder. A new study by the Dutch architecture and urbanism studio XML shows that it didn’t happen by pure chance. XML has completed a comparative study titled “Olympic Cities” that analyses how and why various cities approach their candidature for hosting the Olympics. Trying to unveil what should be the perfect model for The Netherland’s candidature in 2028, this study has come to discover a whole lot more about the current economic, cultural and geographical model guiding the Olympics.
Even though we think it’s all about sports, unfortunately, it may actually be all about money. The current model underlining the Games since the 1972 Montreal’s near-bankruptcy situation, the economic model has been described through a paradigm of the mega-event. This mega-event model, as the authors state, will inevitably lead to the Games being held in “upcoming, non-democratic countries who simply have the centralised power and money to organise them”, since the public in democratic countries may feel uncomfortable with the privileges the organizers receive, and the amount of capital needed for the production.
In order to bring the Games back to the people, to a more down-to-earth model, where everything is more about sports and less about sponsors, XML has proposed three spatial models which should respond actively to the future economical and socio-political trends every Olympic Games are closely linked to.
