Abstract
Since the Olympic Agenda 2020, legacy has been widely used as a justification for hosting the Olympic Games, through which sustainable development can be achieved for both events and host cities. To date, no universal definition of legacy has been established, which presents challenges for legacy-related international knowledge transfer among host cities. To address this gap, a multilingual systematic review of the literature regarding the concept of legacy was conducted in French, Japanese, Chinese, and English. Using English literature as a baseline, points of convergence and divergence among the languages were identified. While all four languages value the concept of legacy as an important facet of mega-events, significant differences were found within each language. This finding highlights the importance of strategies that align different cultures when promoting sustainable development of some global movements such as the Olympic legacy. Sport management is replete with international topics, such as international events and sport for development, and each topic is studied simultaneously in several languages and with potentially differing frameworks and perspectives. Thus, literature reviews that examine the English literature, exclusively, are innately limited in scope. The development of partnerships and resources that facilitate cross-lingual and cross-cultural consultation and collaboration is an important research agenda. More research is needed on knowledge translation across languages.
Highlights
The Olympic Games are the largest sporting event on earth and the most international in terms of viewership, participation, and hosting
As the term legacy has been adopted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) since the 1990s and used internationally for far longer than leveraging, in the current review we examined the linguistic relativity of the term legacy
Intra-language inconsistencies exist in the definitions: in the Chinese literature, some scholars defined legacy by its cultural and spiritual attributes [60,61,62], emphasizing its intangible aspect
Summary
The Olympic Games (hereafter Olympics) are the largest sporting event on earth and the most international in terms of viewership, participation, and hosting. Given the size of the event and types of competition held, host cities of the Olympics spend millions of public tax dollars on planning and delivering the Games [1,2,3]. The estimated cost of hosting the 2020 Tokyo Olympics was $15.4 billion, 43.5% of which came from tax revenue [4]. Cited justifications for the lavish expenditures associated with Olympics include claims that these events produce sustainable, positive, and lasting legacies, such as economic growth, better social justice and welfare conditions in the host country, and improved international relations [5,6,7,8].
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call