Sport Mega-events, ambitions and disappointments: a never-ending history of conflicts and struggles?
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Date
2016
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AESOP
Abstract
The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics were the first full-fledge corporate capitalist Games. By 1984, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had, under the guidance of President Juan Antonio Samaranch, started to become the business behemoth we know today. The Los Angeles Games were the first Olympics to be fulsomely sponsored by the private sector. Yet, I argue the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics should be viewed as a neoliberal blip on the wider terrain of celebration capitalism’s development. The LA Games famously generated a profit of $222 million, but that doesn’t take into account the hidden public surpluses like transportation infrastructure, policing, and security.
In the early 1980s the IOC felt it needed to diversify its revenue streams so it wasn’t so reliant on television-rights money. There was also the desire to control the marketing of the Games and to squelch renegade firms’ ambush marketing efforts. With this in mind, in 1983 the IOC established The Commission for New Sources of Financing. Two years later, and in the wake of the markedly commercial LA ‘84 Games, the IOC founded “The Olympic Programme” (TOP), which later became the “Worldwide Partner Program.” Today, corporate sponsors have become ubiquitous at the Olympics. The 1984 Olympics and the corporate sponsorship program have led many to argue that the Olympic Games are a picture-perfect example of neoliberal capitalism—or neoliberalism. Neoliberal capitalism is marked by privatization, deregulation, and the financialization of the economy. The idea is to deliberately dismantle the social welfare state while snuffing out Keynesian principles and programs. Neoliberal capitalism’s much-recited mantra is to let the market decide.
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Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the south
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