Abstract
In her insightful article of 2003, the sociologist Jackie Hogan noted that, in their post-1984, Hollywood form, Olympic opening ceremonies were ‘elaborately staged and commercialized narratives of nation’; these narratives necessarily contained ‘ideological tensions’.1 The commercial value of these ceremonies is not in doubt. Sky News reported late in 2011 that: ‘The opening and closing ceremonies of the London 2012 Olympics could net broadcasters up to £5bn in advertising, organisers have said’.2
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Notes
International Olympic Committee, Technical Manual on Ceremonies (Lausanne: IOC, November 2005), p. 27, http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/files/Technical_ Manual_on_Ceremonies.pdf; accessed 9 November 2014.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006 [originally published in 1983]).
See, for instance, Ruth Lister, ‘From equality to social inclusion: New Labour and the welfare state’, Critical Social Policy, Vol. 18, No. 55 (May 1998), pp. 215–225.
Richard J. Evans, ‘The wonderfulness of us (the Tory interpretation of history)’, London Review of Books, Vol. 33, No. 6 (17 March 2011), pp. 9–12, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n06/richard-j-evans/the-wonderfulness-of-us; accessed 17 November 2014.
Amy Raphael, Danny Boyle: Creating Wonder (London: Faber, 2013), pp. 411–412.
See David Clay Large, ‘The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936’, in Helen Jefferson Lenskyj and Stephen Wagg (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Olympic Studies(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 60–72, at pp. 62–64.
For a full account of Ali’s politics, see Mike Marqusee, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (London: Verso, 2000).
The Brookings Institution Centre on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, Moving Beyond Sprawl: The Challenge for Metropolitan Atlanta (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2000), p. 16, http://www.brookings.edu/∼/media/research/files/reports/2000/3/atlanta/atlanta.pdf; accessed 4 February 2015.
See Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, The Best Olympics Ever? Social Impacts of Sydney 2000 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 220.
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© 2015 Stephen Wagg
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Wagg, S. (2015). ‘Isambard Kingdom Brunel Wasn’t a Marxist’: The Opening Ceremony of London 2012. In: The London Olympics of 2012. Global Culture and Sport Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137326348_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137326348_5
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