|  | Current Issues | No.49 January 2007 |
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A Continuing Olympic Legacy — The Sydney Experience Richard Cashman |
Legacy has become increasingly prominent in Olympic discourse. An international legacy conference at the Olympic Museum at Lausanne in 2002 made a cogent case for greater attention to and research on Olympic legacy. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) had earlier recognised the importance of impacts when it created the Olympic Games Global Impact (OGGI) program in 2001. OGGI, which operates over an 11-year cycle from two years before the selection of a host city to two years after the staging of an Olympic Games, represents a sustained effort to collect and capture Olympic social, environmental and economic impacts. The benefits of OGGI are twofold: it will assist with the transfer of Olympic knowledge from one Olympic city to another and it will enable the IOC to better understand and manage future Olympic Games. Impacts are immensely important because they relate to issues of sustainability, accountability and evaluation. At the 2002 legacy conference, IOC President Dr Jacques Rogge warned against the danger of luxury developments made in the name of the Olympic Games that become white elephants afterwards. The importance of evaluation had been noted earlier by Maurice Roche in 1992 when he stated that ‘pre-event projections are seldom tested against post-event accounting’ (Roche, 1992, pp. 563–600). Canadian scholar Harry Hiller argued that ‘legacy’ usually comes with a ‘golden halo’ in that those who use this term believe that it invariably leads to a ‘positive end result’. Hiller preferred the more neutral term ‘impacts’ because it allows both positive and negative possibilities (Hiller, 2003, pp. 102–9). Legacy is better regarded as an effort to maximise positive outcomes and to minimise negative ones. With the encouragement of the IOC, Olympic cities are now placing greater emphasis on legacy policy and implementation. This now takes place at the time of the bid and during the lead-up years to an Olympic Games. Legacy had now become an important item in pre-Games agendas. It has become commonplace for serious discussion to take place during this period. A legacy symposium, ‘Thinking through the Games: Legacies, Communities and Inclusion’, was held on 1 November 2006 at the University of British Columbia with the support of VANOC, the Vancouver Olympic Organising Committee. A London conference on ‘Legacy Lives’ conference is scheduled for 30 and 31 January 2007.
A continuing legacy It is usually assumed that a city’s legacy is planned before an Olympic Games and is implemented and realised soon afterwards on a one-off basis. OGGI allocated the relatively short time of two years to assess and report on a wide range of impacts. One suspects that the evaluation of post-Games impacts is largely confined to one year because the finalisation of the 11-year OGGI report must occupy most of research attention in the second post-Games year. My study of the legacy of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games suggests that the OGGI timetable relating to impacts is far too narrow. I have found that legacy is a dynamic force that continues to evolve over the next decade after the staging of an Olympic Games. The impacts of the Sydney 2000 Olympic and Paralympic Games continue to resonate in the city, state and country, in 2006 as further outcomes become apparent. Some of these impacts are direct and planned outcomes, while others are more indirect and unplanned. There are also some Olympic legacy surprises and even shocks in the post-Games period. It has become abundantly clear that the full range of impacts were not apparent in Sydney in 2001 and 2002 (one or two years after the Games). In fact a clearer picture of impacts did not emerge until a later date. Sydney has had quite a chequered legacy history, a difficult initial few years, followed by more positive developments later. An overview of Sydney’s legacy experience from 2000 to 2006 will further illustrate the idea of a continuing legacy. Sydney’s legacy vision and experience It is important to note that legacy was a far less important Olympic agenda in 1993, when Sydney won the bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. Legacy then was an informal rather than a formal factor in Sydney’s bid. Every city, like Sydney, had its legacy vision — the rationale for the staging of the Games — but there were few efforts to spell out what this meant and how it would be realised. There was also only limited evaluation of legacy bid promises after the Games. Games organisers of this era assumed that legacy was a self-evident fact and would flow from the Games as a matter of course. Sydney’s Olympic vision consisted of three main dimensions: 1. The creation of a super sports precinct in western Sydney (Sydney Olympic Park) that would also provide facilities for recreation, leisure and culture. 2. The establishment of an environmental showcase there (what the media dubbed as the Green Games). 3. The global promotion of the city leading to increased tourism and other business benefits. Sydney Olympic Park was the city’s major Olympic development. It was assumed by Sydney’s Olympic organisers that the creation of a large Olympic precinct at Sydney Olympic Park with state-of-the-art sports facilities was a beneficial and much-needed legacy for the people of western Sydney and one that would make the bid attractive to the public — which it did. Olympic planners also believed that Sydney Olympic Park would be embraced by the Sydney public after the Games. While this vision was admired by politicians, community leaders and the people of Sydney, more generally before 2000, it soon became apparent after the Games that there were insufficient legacy plans in place to make the Park viable both in terms of sports spectatorship and sports participation. The Park was frequently empty in 2001 and 2002. One commentator described the Park as a ghost town and another referred to it as a ‘wasteland of white elephants’ (Cashman, 2006, p. 31). The Park failed to realise its goals in these initial years because there was all too little legacy planning. There were insufficient major sporting and cultural events to attract the public to the Park. Ric Birch, the acclaimed director of the Sydney Olympic ceremonies, noted in 2001 that an attractive built environment is insufficient to generate public attachment to a Park: ‘you need to create an atmosphere’ that generates public confidence (Cashman, 2006, p. 154). Some other legacy plans were not realised for other reasons. Sydney’s tourism projections fell well short of expectations in 2001, 2002 and 2003 — when inbound tourism actually declined — largely because of external factors: international terrorism, SARS, the rise of the Australian dollar and the slowing down of some Asian economies. It was to the credit of those responsible for Sydney’s post-Games environment and the NSW Government that they responded to these post-Games legacy problems. The Sydney Olympic Park Authority (SOPA) drafted a masterplan in 2002 that provided a lifeline for the Park in that it advocated residential and commercial development there. This was a frank recognition that the precinct could not survive on sport and recreation alone. The masterplan recommended the erection of large apartment towers to house 15,000 people in the centre of the Park. It was also planned to attract small and medium businesses to the Park so that there would be a daily work force of 15,000. The commercial development of the Park has been quite impressive since then. Another two hotels will be opened by 2008 to add to the existing Novotel and Ibis hotels. The Commonwealth Bank announced in 2006 that it would shift almost half of its office staff from the city of Sydney to the Park with ‘5000 jobs’ moved there by 2009 and housed in three seven-storey towers (Sydney Morning Herald, 13 July 2006). Mark Rosenberg, Marketing Director of SOPA, believed that business activity at the Park has expanded impressively for two main reasons. Facilities there attract a growing number of meetings, exhibitions and conferences. The Park has also benefited from its location of the edge of western Sydney, which has experienced spectacular economic growth over the past three years (Communication, Mark Rosenberg). The negative media stories of 2001 and 2002 were replaced by positive ones by 2006. An article in the Sydney Daily Telegraph (27 August 2006) contended that a second building boom at Sydney Olympic Park from 2006 to 2008 would be almost as spectacular as the one from 1996 to 1999, when the sports precinct was created. While the first building boom related primarily to sport, culture and the environment, the second was driven more by commercial and residential imperatives. So does this represent a pragmatic retreat from the original Olympic vision? Does the development of a multi-purpose park dilute Olympic legacy? The establishment of banks and businesses and a permanent residential population do not detract from sports, cultural and environmental objectives in my opinion. A permanent park population of around 30,000 will enable more Sydneysiders to access the Park’s sporting, recreational and leisure options and add value to this Olympic precinct.
Flexible and constructive post-Games policies Since 2001, individuals and government have responded to new post-Games opportunities that were not apparent in 2000. The Sydney-Beijing Olympic Secretariat (SBOS), which was established in February 2002, is an innovative response to Beijing’s success in winning the bid for the 2008 Olympic Games in 2001. The Secretariat, which was established by the New South Wales Government, assists Australian firms to gain access to the Chinese Olympic market. SBOS has worked well because it enlisted the active support of individuals, such as Sandy Hollway, who had been prominent in the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Australia has developed a highly profitable Olympic and Games export industry and has secured significant business at Athens, Beijing and London as well as Asian and Commonwealth Games cities such as Doha, Guangzhou and New Delhi. While it is difficult to measure the precise extent and worth of this export industry, there are grounds for believing that Australia has been more successful than many other countries in securing Olympic contracts, consultancies and advisory roles. Australians have won Chinese contracts to assist in the design and construction of the National Swimming Centre (the Watercube) and the Olympic village in Beijing and the sailing facility at Qingdao for instance. I plan to research and publish a report on The Australian Olympic Caravan, with a sub-title of Creating and Maintaining a Unique Export Industry. Conclusions Few Olympic organisers have realised that the post-Games period is equally challenging to the pre-Games period when there are a multitude of budget issues, controversies and refinements to Olympic plans and policies. The Sydney experience suggests that while there are negative outcomes to avoid after the Games, there are new legacy benefits that can be accessed providing there are individuals and institutions ready to capitalise on them. To ensure that an Olympic city secures the best legacy outcomes, it is clear that greater attention needs to be paid to the development and refinement of post-Games policies and the creation of appropriate authorities so that a city can maximise its legacy potential. Post-Games planners also need to be aware of the idea of a continuing legacy, of the need to adapt to a changing post-Games environment. This is not an easy task because the post-Games environment is a difficult one as all Olympic cities suffer from an extended post-Olympic malaise. Legacy is a rich area for future study for scholars. I plan to complete four separate projects on different aspects of Sydney’s legacy by 2010. The first project on the legacy of the Sydney Olympic Games was published in 2006 (see below). Work is underway (with Simon Darcy) on a companion volume of the legacy of the Sydney 2000 Paralympic Games. A third project, The Australian Olympic Caravan, has been mentioned above. A final project will examine the history of Sydney Olympic Park from 2000 to 2010. This project will explore the post-Games history and transformation of this unique precinct. I hope that others will recognise the value of such research and undertake legacy studies in other Olympic cities.
|  | Material for this article has been drawn from my book, The Bitter-Sweet Awakening: The Legacy of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, which was published by Walla Walla Press, Sydney, 2006 (www.wallawallapress.com). The title for the book was taken from a Barcelona newspaper, El Pais, in 1993, one year after the successful Barcelona Olympic Games. The statement ‘The bitter-sweet awakening from the Olympic dream’ underlines the difficult character of the post-Olympic environment.
References Cashman, R. (2006). The Bitter-Sweet Awakening: The Legacy of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Sydney: Walla Walla Press. Hiller, H. (2003). Toward a Science of Olympic Outcomes. In Moragas, Kennett and Puig, The Legacy of the Olympic Games, pp. 102–9. Moragas, M., Christopher Kennett and Nuria Puig (2003). The Legacy of the Olympic Games 1984–2000. Lausanne: IOC. Roche, Maurice (1992). Mega-events and micro-modernisation: On the sociology of new urban tourism. British Journal of Sociology, 43, pp. 563–600. Contact Adjunct Professor Richard Cashman Director Australian Centre for Olympic Studies University of Technology, Sydney Sydney, Australia r.cashman@uts.edu.au http://www.icsspe.org/portal/index.php?w=1&z=5 A Continuing Olympic Legacy — The Sydney Experience Richard Cashman