From event legacy to leveraging and capacity building

Jon Helge Lesjø
Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences

In his new book, Vassil Girginov, reader in Sport Management and Development at Brunel University London, and well-known for his research on the Olympics, proposes a new way of placing emphasis in the legacy discourse. The concept of legacy along with sustainability has been institutionalised in the Olympic movement and written into the Olympic charter, and is recognised in the host city contracts between the IOC and the local hosts. It has become a requirement for all bidding campaigns to voice promises on event legacy for the host city and the nation’s sport. In the research fields on Olympism and sport events too, there has been an increasing interest in legacy studies, as demonstrated in the literature and documented in bibliographies of the phenomena.

The state of the art, however, according to Girginov is not solely promising. Therefore, he argues for the necessity of rethinking the whole legacy endeavour, which is his ambition in his newly published book –the gist of which is pedagogically presented in 500 words at the start of the book. The reasons for reconsidering are several, most importantly that the broad and mainly retrospective concept in use does not serve the Olympic movement well, and certainly implies a lot of methodological difficulties. Many of the effects from an event are difficult to identify in retrospect, and most of them are not the responsibility of the event’s owner. The dominant legacy methodology that builds on a causal logic – viewing the impact as consequences of the event – has problems separating the impact of the Games from other occurrences.

With reference to the Olympic scholar and anthropologist John J. MacAloon, the author reminds us of the cultural framing of Olympism and the Olympic festival. These encourage a perspective where the IOC is in a position to transfer cultural capital to the upcoming hosts of the serial phenomena characterising the Olympic Games. The hosts could then enhance this capital both for the city’s own benefits and for the ensuing events.

Rather than the well-established retrospective thinking of legacy as what is left after the Games, Girginov sees the key issue as “How do legacies come about?” at all.  This opens up for a resource perspective of how the Games interact with society and a strategic management thinking with concepts like ‘leveraging’ and the process of ‘capacity building’. Leveraging, he writes “concerns the intentional acquisition, coordination and deployment of resources for achieving organisational ends” (p. 65), and in the summary,

Leveraging is not a single activity but involves a set of processes used to exploit capabilities to take advantage of specific opportunities presented by the Games. Leveraging also reverses the relationship between the Games and society by shifting the responsibility for the delivery of any Olympic-related benefits from event owners and organisers to those who would like to benefit from it (p. 15).

In the Olympic context, the main point with leveraging, he argues, is to create value for the Olympic movement and its stakeholders. The IOC’s responsibility as leader of a movement for social reform is to produce a positive legacy for the main core of Olympism, sport and education. The responsibility for urban renewal, job generation, societal development and modernisation should be left to others.

Consequently, the main mission of the Olympic movement is to improve the conditions for practicing sport and the educational values of sport all over the world. These objectives seem to be under-researched and Girginov brings to the table experiences and data from empirical studies. The book includes experiences from Olympic leveraging and capacity building for National Sport Organisations connected to the London 2012 Games and the 2014 Sochi Games (ch.6), and the role of the higher education sector in host countries are studied with reference to the Games in Sydney, Beijing, London, Rio and Tokyo (ch.7). Additionally, he presents a case study of leveraging connected to the British Paralympic Association, British Cycling and the Russian Skating Federation (ch.8).

The legacy discourse brought in a shift from Olympism’s vague ambitions to contribute to humanism and a better world through sport, to a more concrete expectation of specific societal results. The message from Girginov is that the IOC and the movement had to be more strategic in reaching specific goals in areas they can influence, a way of thinking that is already manifested in the Agenda 2020 recommendations. The large resources accumulated through commercialisation of the Olympic brand have placed the IOC in a position to make a difference. Ninety percent of its annual revenue of over a billion USD is reported to be redistributed to the main stakeholders and to their program Olympic solidarity globally.

The delimitation of IOC’s ambitions to Olympism’s core values may be seen as reasonable, though the sport systems and the higher education sector’s interaction with the Olympics are very different among nations. However, as hosting the Games is still very much dependent on governments and public finances, it would nevertheless be a problem for the legitimacy of the Olympics if they did not have any positive impact beyond sport and education.

Girginov’s rethinking of Olympic legacy has its strengths, but appears to be close to an insider position and suffers from the researchers’ need to also look at the Olympics from a distance. His handling of the Olympic networks as a ‘social movement’ for ‘social reform’ as IOC does, illustrates his position and gives rise to some remarks. One can, as Girginov does with reference to criteria of definition in the literature, regard these networks as a social movement. But there is little reflection in the book aboutwhat kind of a social movement we are talking about. Social movements are usually seen as groupings of non-hegemonic forces fighting for social and political change. The IOC and their ‘movement’ should rather be regarded as a part of the establishment.

The author is well aware that the Olympic Games puts different actors in both favourable and less favourable positions depending on benefit from the Games. But there are no analyses of how the power balances could be altered from incumbents – the urban regimes of city governors and the business community – and more in the direction of challenging groups. His orientation toward strategic leveraging and capacity building could be favourable also for a wider part of the community under the Games’ influence. There is, however, no reflection upon how this could happen and thus contribute to solving some of the problems of legitimacy with which the IOC and its ‘movement’ still have to struggle. Such a contribution, in spite of Girginov’s suggestive work, is still wanting.

Copyright © Jon Helge Lesjø 2018