Designing the Olympics: Representation, Participation, Contestation

摘要

Jilly Traganou has produced a richly informed study on a surprisingly neglected theme, the design dimensions of the Olympic Games. The book is the culmination of a personal and professional odyssey of a dozen years, in which fieldwork visits to European venues—Athens, Barcelona, Rome and Sarajevo—and Sapporo and Tokyo in Japan were interspersed with archival and newspaper research on selected Olympic cases. Bolstering this, she also conducted illuminating interviews with key informants, giving her core case studies on the Athens 2004 Summer Olympics and the Summer Games of London 2012 an insider feel in relation to the organization or the emblematic representation of the event.1 Designing the Olympics constitutes a bold, scholarly and highly original contribution to our understanding of what has regularly generated arguably the largest global media audience in history. Traganou explicitly states that her book 'does not focus on sport or spectacle' (p. 6), a wise decision given the breadth of research and writing on the history, politics and sociology of the Olympic Games. So what is novel and original in what she does focus upon?