Setting the Olympic Stage for Cultural Programming: An Examination of Exercises in Soft Power and Instances of Institutional Entrepreneurship during London 2012

Mental health services at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games during the COVID-19 pandemic

Putting Russia's Ban in Historical Perspective: A Curated Interview

Sports and recreation are essential components of medical rehabilitation. Through these, people with disability learn to adjust to a new self-image; build strength, stamina, and coordination; and learn adaptive skills that help them throughout their life. Sports are also an important means for helping society at large learn about disability and removing some of the stigma associated with having a disability. The pinnacle of many adaptive sports is the Paralympic Games. The Paralympic Games have their origin both in medical rehabilitation and in association with veterans. Although the first Paralympic Games are credited with being held in Rome in 1960, their early beginnings start in 1948 [1]. Shortly after the end of World War II, Sir Ludwig Guttmann recognized the need to provide sport and recreation outlets for the cadre of wounded, injured, or ill British soldiers under his care at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury, England [2]. In 1948, he organized the first Stoke Mandeville Games (SMG), and the participants were patients at the hospital. Most of them had incurred spinal cord injuries during the war. The SMG were very popular among the staff and participants, and news spread quickly to continental Europe. In 1952, the first International SMG was held with several more participating countries [2]. Simultaneously, restless American veterans receiving care in Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals were developing wheelchair basketball. Around the time that the Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA) was formed in 1946, wheelchair basketball also began to grow as a sport [3]. Since its origin, the PVA has supported sports and recreation as important modalities for the health and well-being of its members and all veterans with disabilities. In 1960, 400 athletes from 23 countries around the world started a truly international Olympic-style competition [1]. The Paralympic Games continue to grow and evolve. The numbers of athletes and the types of disabilities have expanded to become more inclusive. In 1976, the Paralympic Games family included individuals with major limb amputations and those with visual impairments [2]. Expanding populations also increased the number of sports. In 1980, athletes with cerebral palsy were invited to participate in the Paralympic Games [2]. The 1984 Paralympic Games were held in both New York City, New York, and at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. This was because of fund raising and organizational challenges that caused an organizational and financial rift between the organizing committees. This set back the Paralympic Games movement and sounded an alarm for change. That change took place when the International Coordinating Committee for World Sports Organizations for the Disabled (ICCWSOD) officially formed the Paralympic Games and retroactively included events back to 1960 [2]. The Paralympic Games were established to parallel the Olympic Games, and from 1988 forward, the Paralympic Games and Olympic Games have been held in the same city in the same year, sharing many of the same venues [1]. In 1989, the ICCWSOD was retired and the International Paralympic Committee was established with 160 member countries headquartered in Bonn, Germany [1]. The Paralympic movement is greater than the Paralympic Games. The motto for the Paralympics is Spirit in Motion [1]. The following driving principles of the Paralympics demonstrate that the movement extends beyond sports and seeks to achieve equality and independence for all people with disability around the globe [1]: * Transcendence: Courage and achievements of the athletes participating to go beyond their limitations. * Equality: Both a statement of fact and an aspiration, encouraging people with disabilities and of different cultures to be viewed as equal. * Integration: Reflects the pursuit of providing equal access to all. The Paralympic movement has paralleled the disability rights movements, and both have contributed greatly toward creating opportunities for people with disability and changing societal perceptions. …

In 2024, Paris will host the Olympic (during July and August) and Paralympic (during September) Summer Games. Despite temperatures often exceeding 40°C in Paris in July, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has indicated that there will be no installation of air conditioning in the athletes' rooms. High ambient temperatures can impair the quantity and quality of sleep and, consequently, impair athletic performance. In this overview, we present the rationale behind and explain the process of how a warm environment is unfavorable to the sleep of Olympic and Paralympic athletes, as well as offer practical recommendations on how to mitigate the effects of environment heat for a restful and effective night's sleep during the Paris 2024 Olympics and Paralympics Games.

What has been the impact of the Olympic Movement on the long-term development of sport around the world? The obvious answer is that it has been transformative, but what about the details? To what extent does the International Olympic Committee (IOC) deliberately plan its activities and structure the Olympic and Winter Olympic Games to bring about long-term, sustainable opportunities for sport and physical activity? How could it do this more effectively? In recent years, the most frequently cited – and studied – Olympic legacies are in the areas of infrastructure (urban renewal, transportation, communications, housing, and sports facilities), international ‘branding’ and tourism, accessibility, and the enhanced capacity of community leaders. The benefits to sport and physical activity are simply taken for granted, on the assumption that new and refurbished sporting facilities and the inspiration of champions ensure increased participation in sport and physical activity. Yet recent research indicates that ‘inspiration is not enough’, that without planned, accessible, and sustained new programmes to build upon the interest generated by Olympic Games, increased participation may not occur. In Canada, for example, despite a long history of successful games and heroic athletic performances, child and youth participation rates in sport and physical activity continue to fall. Yet in the build-up to the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in Vancouver, none of the Canadian sports federations in the Olympic winter sports were engaged in legacy planning or programming, nor did anyone encourage them to do so. I wrestled with these questions in this paper, written in 2002 for a conference jointly sponsored by the Olympic Study Centre at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the IOC. I concluded that the IOC must do much more to institutionalize and strengthen its contribution to sport and physical activity.

BackgroundThe Olympic Games constitute a first-class opportunity to promote athleticism and health messages. Little is known, however on the impact of Olympic Games on the development of health-promotion programs for the general population.Our objective was to identify and describe the population-based health-promotion programs implemented in relation to the Athens 2004 Olympic and Para Olympic Games.MethodsA cross-sectional survey of all stakeholders of the Games, including the Athens 2004 Organizing Committee, all ministries of the Greek government, the National School of Public Health, all municipalities hosting Olympic events and all official private sponsors of the Games, was conducted after the conclusion of the Games.ResultsA total of 44 agencies were surveyed, 40 responded (91%), and ten (10) health-promotion programs were identified. Two programs were implemented by the Athens 2004 Organizing Committee, 2 from the Greek ministries, 2 from the National School of Public Health, 1 from municipalities, and 3 from official private sponsors of the Games. The total cost of the programs was estimated at 943,000 Euros; a relatively small fraction (0.08%) of the overall cost of the Games.ConclusionGreece has made a small, however, significant step forward, on health promotion, in the context of the Olympic Games. The International Olympic Committee and the future hosting countries, including China, are encouraged to elaborate on this idea and offer the world a promising future for public health.

We need a global conversation on the 2020 Olympic Games

Zika virus and the 2016 Olympic Games – Editors' reply

A-39 A Comparison of Concussion Reporting between the Olympic and Paralympic Games

According to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), planning for and working to realize an event legacy for a host city is an essential part of being awarded the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The IOC also mandates that each host city mount a Cultural Olympiad showcasing, often over successive years, the best in local, national, and international art and performance. What, then, is the cultural legacy of an Olympics—and how do we measure it? As playwright and theatre director Marie Clements asks in this issue, what is the equivalent for a local arts community of a gleaming new hockey rink or a sleekly designed swimming pool? The question is an important one, because while it is most often artists who are called upon to produce the symbolic character, festive tone, commemorative feelings, and aesthetic look of an Olympic and Paralympic Games—via opening and closing ceremonies, public art commissions, performance programming, and even the design of medals, logos, and mascots—it is this same group that often bears the brunt of post-Olympic austerity budgets and funding cuts. In the case of Vancouver, which (together with the resort town of Whistler) hosted the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, these cuts actually began before the Games themselves, and as Duncan Low summarizes in his essay in this issue, arts funding in British Columbia has still not returned to pre-2009 levels. One immediate consequence for the theatre community in Vancouver was that even a venerable institution like the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, whose finances were already precarious, was unable to sustain its operations past the one-time infusion of Olympic special event funding. As Clements and PuSh Festival Artistic and Executive Director Norman Armour both note in these pages, the struggles that existed for the arts community before the Olympics still pertain: access to funding, access to space, and a competition for audiences. Yet both Armour and Clements insist that the 2010 Cultural Olympiad helped them produce work of a scale that they would otherwise have been unable to realize. Employing a baseball metaphor, Armour suggests that the Big Show that is the Olympic spotlight forced local cultural producers to step up to the plate, by Peter Dickinson, Kirsty Johnston, and Keren Zaiontz

The laboratory anti-doping services during XXII Winter Olympic and XI Paralympic games in Sochi in 2014 were provided by a satellite laboratory facility located within the strictly secured Olympic Park. This laboratory, established and operated by the personnel of Antidoping Center, Moscow, has been authorized by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to conduct doping control analyses. The 4-floor building accommodated the most advanced analytical instrumentation and became a place of attraction for more than 50 Russian specialists and 25 foreign experts, including independent observers. In total, 2134 urine and 479 blood samples were delivered to the laboratory and analyzed during the Olympic Games (OG), and 403 urine and 108 blood samples - during the Paralympic Games (PG). The number of erythropoietin tests requested in urine was 946 and 166 at the OG and PG, respectively. Though included in the test distribution plan, a growth hormone analysis was cancelled by the Organizing Committee just before the Games. Several adverse analytical findings have been reported including pseudoephedrine (1 case), methylhexaneamine (4 cases), trimetazidine (1 case), dehydrochloromethyltestosterone (1 case), clostebol (1 case), and a designer stimulant N-ethyl-1-phenylbutan-2-amine (1 case).

Outside of the Paralympic Games, elite athletes with disability rarely feature in the media. Using mixed method content analysis, the aim of this study was to compare the production and content of the 2016 Paralympic and Olympic Games broadcasts of an Australian commercial television network. Data were collected from recordings of a daily highlights show of the Paralympic and Olympic Games using a data abstraction tool with a priori codes. Data were coded for – content, participant(s) and context. Results suggest the Paralympic Games was broadcast as an entertainment show rather than a major sporting event. There were greater attempts during the Paralympic broadcast to elicit emotion; notions of competition vs. participation were raised; and stories of disability ran parallel to those of hardship. These differences in media portrayal of elite athletes with disability feed into existing notions that under-values their athleticism.

Our first aim was to evaluate the representation of athletes in the top newspapers in a continental European country during two editions of the Paralympics and Olympics Games (London 2012 and Rio 2016), by means of quantitative content analysis. The second aim was to critically analyse how athletes are constructed in newspapers using Michel Foucault’s theoretical framework on the construction of subjectivities and difference. The newspapers acting as an instrument, use a set of strategies to reinforce the differential treatment of Paralympic versus Olympic athletes: focusing on the effort, dedication and suffering only of athletes participating in the Paralympic Games, newspapers construct a discourse in which they separate, in an apparently natural way, some (Paralympic) athletes from other (Olympic) athletes. Two decades into the 21st century, even the newspapers of a liberal European democracy are using the same pathological model to cover Paralympic athletes who actively participate in sports competitions.

IntroductionAmong the 43 venues of Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games (OG) and 33 venues of Paralympic Games (PG) were held, the heat island effect was highly expected to cause heat-related illnesses...

Who Is to Blame and What Is to Be Done? The Rise and Fall of Russian Authority in the Olympics