The Olympics come with fine promises of sustainability and social responsibility. But reality doesn't always match the rhetoric
In merely seven months, London will host the 2012 Olympics. For many, the Olympics are a high-flying festival of fun, with the world's finest athletes competing under the global media spotlight. For others, the games are a hyper-commercialised pageant of corporate power that encourages jingoism while devouring taxpayer money.
Thanks to the glitzy gerbil wheel of spectacular Olympism, we tend to plunge ahead to the next Olympics without seriously considering what happened at the last one. But Britons would do well to think about the Olympics' track record, and what, in some ways, has become the customary chasm between pre-games word and post-games deed.
Looking back at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver is a great place to start. The Vancouver Organising Committee (Vanoc) made grand avowals regarding sustainability and potential benefits for all Canadians in general and aboriginal people in particular. Revisiting these promises gives us much-needed perspective on some of the assurances London organisers are dishing out today.
Powerful people bandying about the term "sustainability" demands our healthy skepticism so sustainability doesn't simply mean "sustaining" capital accumulation, but actually means "sustaining" the environment. In the 1990s, astride a burgeoning global environmental movement, the International Olympic Committee hopped on the green train, folding ecological concerns into its rhetorical portfolio. By the end of the 1990s, "Agenda 21" was born (pdf), and Olympic bigwigs were declaring the games should be "an effective contribution to sustainable development" (pdf). Even IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch got the fever, editorialising in the Olympic Review that he wanted to put "the Olympic Games at the service of the quest for excellence, solidarity and respect of the environment" (pdf).
By the time the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics rolled around, "sustainability" was enshrined as the third pillar of the Olympics, along with sport and culture. Olympic boosters dubbed Vancouver "the greenest Games ever". However, according to a report from the University of British Columbia's Centre for Sport and Sustainability (pdf), greenhouse gas emissions increased steadily during the delivery phase of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and rose eight-fold during the games themselves. A significant chunk of this derives from the inevitable need to travel to Vancouver to participate and spectate. More than half the energy used for the games came from fossil fuels that exacerbate climate change. Additionally, the production of solid waste during the games was ten times as much as before the games were delivered and staged. And this damning data, it should be remembered, were largely supplied by Vanoc itself, not an independent source.
According to London's original bid, sustainability "is integral to every aspect of London 2012's vision for the games" (pdf). The bid championed the theme of "Towards a One Planet Olympics", which aims to reduce carbon emissions and waste while conserving biodiversity and promoting environmental ethics/awareness. After surveying London's green cred, academics Graeme Hayes and John Horne recently argued that "London 2012 offers only a hollowed-out form of sustainable development." London organisers have time to prove their critics wrong, but shiny-packaged rhetoric is not enough. London has the built-in advantage of a relatively strong environmental politics culture, replete with a willingness to address climate change, especially when compared to perennial foot-draggers like the United States.
It is important to note that Agenda 21 also deals with issues of issues of social sustainability, or how traditionally marginalised groups might actually benefit from the games. For an instructive example from Vancouver, one need only look to the Four Host First Nations, a non-profit organisation that was established to facilitate aboriginal inclusion in all aspects of the 2010 games. In return for helping Vanoc host an outstanding party, the hosts, and aboriginal people generally, were promised they would come out ahead in these high-stakes corporate games.
Did they? The Centre for Sport and Sustainability report (pdf) shows the number of aboriginal people with Vanoc jobs "decreased rapidly" from 11-13% in 2008-2009 to 1-3% in the lead-up to and during the games. The authors of the report offer no reasons for the decline and do not provide other measurable indicators for benefits to aboriginal people.
Londoners who believe they will capitalise on the 2012 games thanks to promises of regeneration and the Olympics' positive "legacy" take heed: aboriginal people were positioned as one of the main beneficiaries of the much-vaunted legacies from 2010. Their involvement was so important that Jack Poole, chairman of the board for Vanoc, stated: "If it hadn't been for the full support of the Four Host First Nations in our bid, we likely wouldn't be talking about Vancouver 2010 today."
Olympism and its stated commitment to foster "social responsibility" (pdf) is understandably an easy sell. Because aboriginal people experience disparities on almost every social indicator imaginable, it is not hard to see how many would be attracted to assurances of an Olympic windfall. But the two-and-a-half-week sportstopia took advantage of the indigenous equivalent of "greenwashing", shunting the already marginalised further toward the edge.
And this is to say nothing of Olympics economics, which, for many, has become a gold-medal hoodwink, with "lowballing" the costs of the games during the bid process becoming a competitive sport in itself. Just take the small slice of the Olympics budget designated for security. Vancouver initially estimated policing would cost $175m. By the time the games rolled around, the price tag had ballooned to more than $1bn.
Same thing for London where initial estimates for venue security were £282m. London organisers recently announced these costs had nearly doubled to a whopping £553m. This led the National Audit Office to write, in typically understated fashion, that "the likelihood that the games can still be funded within the Public Sector Funding Package is finely balanced, with minimal room for costs to increase." In bureaucrat-speak that translates to "Britons, get ready to pull out your wallets."
For those who care about both the Olympics and issues of social justice, it behoves us to pay close attention to the past and to challenge the IOC to live up to its high-minded rhetoric. Sport and equity can rhyme, but it takes honesty, vigilance, and a willingness to press beyond standard-issue five-ring rhetoric.