The Legacy of the Olympic Games: A Review

Abstract

Much has been written about the legacies of Olympic Games but there have been little efforts to synthesize current knowledge. This has led to inconsistencies in defining, contextualising and measuring these legacies. The literature review described in this paper provides an overview over research on the legacy of the Olympic Games from 1908 to 2016 that was published in peer-reviewed journals between 1984 and 2017.The analysis reveals a significant increase of literature dealing with Olympic legacy since 2008. It turns out that considerably more studies relate to the legacy of Summer Olympic Games than of Winter Games. Regarding the six different facets of legacy of the framework that was employed, 'urban development' and 'beliefs and behaviour' have been scrutinized much more often than the other four. Regarding the methodologies used in legacy studies there is a dominance of commentary articles and a lack of adequate empirical research. This leads to a number of implications for future studies, which are discussed in the paper.

A positive legacy – against all odds Olympic facilities at the 1994 Olympic Winter Games

“…First, as pointed out by Thomson et al (2019), legacy analysis has been done within a relatively short timeframe around the actual events. In their mapping of legacy literature, Bocarro, Byers, and Carter (2018) found that timeframes used to capture legacy rarely exceeded five years, which is in line with Scheu et al (2019), who found in their review that the average time of post-Games data collection was two years after the event. Given that it takes 15-30 years to gain insight into the true legacy of an event (Gratton & Preuss, 2008;Parent & Smith-Swan, 2013), neither the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa nor the 2012 Olympic Games in London (two events that have dominated the legacy literature) are suitable for retrospective studies.…”

“…3 the following, we narrow the review to facilities. While some longitudinal studies of facilities exist, a majority of the papers are commentary (Scheu et al, 2019). In this section, we will look at events that were held from 1988 to 2006, a period in which actual legacy is possible to assess.…”

“…Compared to the Olympic Summer Games, only a small number of articles have been published related to the Winter Olympics (Dickson et al, 2011). Scheu et al (2019) found that 18 per cent of the papers addressed the legacy of the Winter Games. Most of these studies have been on planning or expectation of legacies before the Games, or conducted within a short timeframe of the event.…”

“…Did the organizer, unlike most Olympic hosts, manage to plan in such a good way that the legacy is essentially positive, or is this a matter of coin-cidences? Insight into the legacy of Lillehammer is poor because hardly any papers have been published on the topic (Scheu, Preuss, & Könecke, 2019). This paper will fill some gaps.…”

“…We limit ourselves to sports facilities, an area of Olympic projects that seems to give the host region big challenges after the event. For example, Scheu et al (2019) identified five 'winter cities' to which a rather negative sporting legacy was attributed, i.e. venues built for the Games remained empty or underused after the Games (Sochi 2014, Torino 2006, Nagano 1998, Sarajevo 1984 [venues also destroyed by the war] and Grenoble 1968).…”