A significant attempt to unpack the paradoxes and tensions of Olympic laws

Jan Andre Lee Ludvigsen
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Liverpool John Moores University

It is perhaps needless to state that the world’s largest sport mega-event, the Olympics, intersects with questions of law, regulation, and human rights wherever in the world its summer or winter editions pop up. The staging of a commercially viable and secure Olympic events often relies on the reconfiguration of extant national legal frameworks. Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committees’ (IOC) own conditions must be adhered to by countries accepting the Olympic hosting rights. However, this has also been a big source of contention, exemplified by the London Olympic and Paralympic Games Act 2006 (which passed prior to London 2012) and the reports of ‘pompous’ IOC demands partly contributing to the withdrawal of Oslo’s bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics (Shirinian, 2014).

In an age where the Olympics’ social and economic costs are subject to increased scrutiny from academics, journalists and activist groups, Mark James and Guy Osborn’s Olympic Laws: Culture, Values, Tensions leads the way by exploring ‘Lex Olympica’ and ‘Olympic law’ and, crucially, the tensions between the Olympic movement’s values and ethos and concurrent embrace of commercialism.

Against the background of more intense ‘anti-Olympic’ activism in bidding or host cities, and a declining appetite among entrepreneurial cities to even enter the race for mega-event hosting rights, the authors remind us why such radical recalibrations are urgently needed.

The authors critically explore this further, focusing primarily on the impacts upon athletes and Olympic host cities. Yet, beyond their critical analysis, it is also refreshing to read that the authors provide an argument that, normatively, looks towards change and the creation of alternatives. In a straight-to-the-point fashion, the authors outline early how:

Focussing on the legality of the restrictive impact of the Olympic legal framework on athletes, we argue that this clash between culture and commerce within the Olympic Movement is unbalanced and that a recalibration of the relationship is needed to achieve a workable equilibrium (p. 1)

In the journey towards their case for recalibration, the concise book is divided into five chapters that will be discussed in somewhat more detail. First, Chapter One outlines the text’s aims, ambitions and context. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics (staged in 2021, during Covid-19) is outlined as a ‘watershed moment’ that, throughout, comes to work as a case study or ‘focal point’ (p. 14) for the book. In various ways, this case epitomized how the Olympics, despite its emphasis on unity, often divides people and communities. It is this dialectic nature – seemingly inherent to the contemporary Olympic Games – that the authors capture in this book: the tension between its desired cultural value (enshrined by the Olympic Charter and the fundamental principles of, inter alia, peace, fair play and good governance) and the seemingly unstoppable commercialization that characterizes the Olympics, and professional sports more broadly.

As the authors write:

[The book] examines two key contentions surrounding the creation and application of Olympic legal norms: that the ability of the IOC to impose its will through the creation of law needs to be recalibrated and its use monitored more explicitly; and that the balance between the ongoing commercialisation of the Olympic Games and the core educational and cultural ethos embedded in the Fundamental Principles of Olympism need to be recalibrated (p. 14).

Chapter Two historicizes the IOC in light of its 1894 inception, Lex Olympica and how Olympic laws, more specifically, have emerged from Lex Olympica, which refers to the IOC’s unique and internalized legal norms. Here, it is contextualized how the creation of Olympic laws – within an Agambian state of exception – serves the interests of the IOC, its partners and sponsors. In this respect, this chapter precisely demonstrates the IOC’s power in the international system. As the chapter summarizes, the ‘IOC is a curious and powerful beast and its law-making powers as a private body are ground-breaking’ (p. 34). The chapter also helps us understand how the IOC’s developed rules and standards – through the Host City Contract – must be accepted by countries deciding to take on the responsibility that arrives with Olympic hosting rights. Yet, the wider significance of this dynamic is – also detectable in other mega-event contexts (see Petersen-Wagner and Lee Ludvigsen, 2024) – of course that it leads to situation where a non-state actor dictates the actions of what, traditionaly, has been the dominant actor of the international system – that is, the state. This chapters thus nicely breaks down the political and legal dynamics enabling this peculiar situation.

Chapter Three focuses mainly on athlete-participants of the Olympics. Specifically, it analyses the impacts of Rule 40(3) of the Olympic Charter (Rule 40) which directly influence athletes’ earnings and the right to earn a living from their own sponsors, while serving to protect the Olympic brand from external advertising and ‘non-official’ sponsors. This, in turn, has revealed the legal tension between the IOC’s policies, national and EU law – as evidenced by the Deutscher Olympischer Sportsbund case which challenged the restrictions imposed on athletes and successfully established that ‘Lex Olympica must comply with national and EU law’ (p. 58) and concurrently led to a revised version of Rule 40 ahead of Tokyo 2020.

The final two chapters focus on issues of freedom of expression at the Olympics (Chapter Four) and makes the case for a recalibration of the IOC’s relationships with athletes and cities and the organization’s law-making capabilities (Chapter Five). Chapter Four provides an exemplary insight into the vague, paradoxical politics of Rule 50 which prohibits political demonstrations, as well as political, racial or religious propaganda, in Olympic spaces and arenas. As this chapter demonstrates, this again gives life to important questions concerning what exactly constitutes a political ‘demonstration’; and also, how this impacts athlete activism and the human right to freedom of expression. Although I understand the authors are primarily concerned here with Rule 50’s impact on athletes, it could also have been interesting to briefly consider its sanitizing implications upon the reconfiguration of Olympic consumable spaces and the spectators inhabiting them, whereby politics is discouraged and consumption encouraged.

The final Chapter Five makes the case for a recalibration of the IOC’s relationship with athletes, the Host City Contract and the organization’s law-making capabilities. Here, the authors argue for the importance of relationality in IOC’s relationships, demonstrated by how they argue that the ‘IOC must undertake a complete recalibration of its relationships with its key stakeholders’ (p. 98). Against the background of more intense ‘anti-Olympic’ activism in bidding or host cities, and a declining appetite among entrepreneurial cities to even enter the race for mega-event hosting rights (see Lauermann, 2022), the authors remind us why such radical recalibrations are urgently needed. As they write: ‘Without these recalibrations, it can no longer be taken as read, if it ever could, that the Olympic Games is a force for good’ (p. 89). Overall, James and Osborn’s book and conclusions demonstrate how sport both was and is political. Beyond being well-written and researched, the text is also extremely timely, and published at a time where some suggest that the Olympics have reached their ‘peak’ vis-à-vis their scale and size, making it necessary to rethink, even de-grow the Olympics (Müller et al., 2023).

I wish to end this review by positioning the book’s importance in the wider scholarly context. In the social and political study of sport, the study of sport mega-events has, for long, occupied quite a central position. Indeed, it is already ten years ago that Bairner (2014) questioned whether the scholarly coverage of mega-events had ‘surely reached saturation point’. Others have suggested that writings on sport mega-events, in some cases, have been both ‘predictable and repetitive’, though their recurrent nature means that they still warrant attention (Rowe, 2019:4). Whilst there are certain elements of these propositions that I agree with, my own reading is that potential answers to overcoming the ‘trap’ of potential saturation are, first, interdisciplinarity (acknowledging the occasionally slippery nature of this term) which contributes to new fields of study. Second, being responsive to emerging issues within the mega-event realm.

In my opinion, James and Osborn’s socio-legal approach, capturing long-term and ‘post-covid’ trends, means that they manage to do both of these well. Beyond making an important contribution to sports law, their analysis also drives forward debates in the social and political scientific study of sport, and will figure as an important resource for researchers and students within all these areas in the years to come.

As the authors remind us, ‘[n]o sooner does one edition of the Olympics finish, than another one starts, and that pregnancy is just as important as legacy’ (p. 105). Now, with ‘all eyes’ on Milano Cortina 2026 and Los Angeles 2028, it will be interesting to see how the theme of Olympic laws evolves.

Copyright © Jan Andre Lee Ludvigsen 2024

References

Bairner, A. (2014) ‘Comprehensive collection, with the usual suspects and some bright spots’. idrottsforum.org. Available at: https://idrottsforum.org/baiala_andrews-carrington140425/.

Lauermann, J. (2022) The declining appeal of mega-events in entrepreneurial cities: From Los Angeles 1984 to Los Angeles 2028. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 40(6): 1203-1218.

Müller, M., Gogishvili, D., Wolfe, S.D., Gaffney, C., Hug, M. and Leick, A. (2023) Peak event: the rise, crisis and potential decline of the Olympic Games and the World Cup. Tourism Management, 95: 1-15.

Petersen‐Wagner, R. and Lee Ludvigsen, J.A. (2024) Between global events and local reverberations: Globalization, local media framing and the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Global Networks, 24(4): 1-15.

Rowe, D. (2019) ‘The worlds that are watching: Media, politics, diplomacy, and the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics’. Communication & Sport 7(1): 3-22.

Shirinian, Z. (2014) ‘”Pompous” IOC demands “led to withdrawal of Oslo 2022 Olympic bid’. Inside the Games. Available at: https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1023008/pompous-ioc-demands-led-to-withdrawal-of-oslo-2022-olympic-bid.