Abstract
With London 2012 about to begin, the Canadian lawyer and former Olympic swimmer Dick Pound (IOC Vice President from 1987 to 1991 and again from 1996 to 2000) was asked by CNN about the financial debacle that had become of his home town Olympics in Montreal back in 1976. Yes, there had been problems, he said, but calling those Games ‘the bankrupt Olympics’ was ‘a bad rap’; after all, they had ‘paved the way for a new financial structure and the introduction of lucrative new television rights deals’. He added:
They were pretty magic. All Olympics are magic but we had [Romanian gymnast Nadia] Comaneci with her first ‘10’ and we had the Spinks brothers and we had Sugar Ray Leonard [Michael and Leon Spinks and Sugar Ray were African American boxers]. I mean we had some magnificent heroes of the modern Olympics.1
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Notes
See Mike Lee, with Adrian Warner and David Bond, The Race for the 2012 Olympics (London: Virgin Books, 2006), pp. 38–39.
The Guardian, 15 January 1994; quoted in Stephen Wagg, ‘Everything else is propaganda: the politics of alternative comedy’, in George E.C. Paton, Chris Powell and Stephen Wagg (eds.), The Social Faces of Humour (Aldershot: Arena, 1996), pp. 321–347, at p. 344.
See Konstantinos Zervas, ‘Anti-Olympic campaigns’, in Helen Jefferson Lenskyj and Stephen Wagg (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Olympic Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 533–548, particularly pp. 539–541.
Bill Mallon, ‘Qualification for Olympic games in the 21st century’, Citius, Altius, Fortius, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 1993), pp. 10–17, p. 10; quoted in Wagg, ‘Tilting at windmills? …’, p. 332.
David L. Andrews and Oliver J.C. Rick, ‘Celebrity and the London 2012 spectacle’, in Vassil Girginov (ed.), Handbook of the London Olympic and Paralympic Games Volume One: Making the Games (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 195–211, p. 202.
William Fotheringham, ‘Magic circle turns Wiggins into a winner’, Observer Sport, 22 July 2012, p. 4.
Dominic Lawson, ‘Dominic Lawson: the Olympics are about ambition, not national pride’, The Independent, 13 March 2012, pp. 16–17, p. 17.
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Wagg, S. (2015). How Good Does That Feel? London 2012: Media and Celebrity. In: The London Olympics of 2012. Global Culture and Sport Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137326348_7
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