If Olympics are to retain status, things have to change

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This was published 9 years ago

If Olympics are to retain status, things have to change

By Louise Evans

One of the best ways to turn a glum nation into a happy, motivated mass is to award it an Olympic Games and sit back and watch the people revel in the gold rush that follows.

Two years ago 64 million Brits overdosed on happiness when they raced up the medal table at the 2012 London Olympics and Paralympics. Po-faced Poms walked down their high street with a spring in their step. Welsh commuters talked to each other on the train. The Scots smiled. The impact on the United Kingdom population's mental and physical health was transformational.

Hosting the Olympics delivers excess and euphoriam, but reforms must be adopted or the Games will start crumbling like some great civilisation of the past.

Hosting the Olympics delivers excess and euphoriam, but reforms must be adopted or the Games will start crumbling like some great civilisation of the past.

The same thing happened in Sochi this year, when 143 million grim-faced Russians rejoiced en masse and danced in the streets, even while sober, when the mother country dominated the gold medal tally at the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Hosting the Olympics has benefited Australia too, as the Sydney 2000 and 1956 Melbourne Games demonstrated. The Olympics opened our minds and doors, made us more self-confident, changed the way we looked at the world and inspired generations to adopt the faster, higher, stronger Olympic motto.

Success in sport has also helped Australia rise to seventh place in the world on the 2013-14 Soft Power Survey, published by Monocle magazine. Monocle and the UK-based Institute for Government think tank rank the top 30 countries that "best attract favour from other countries through diplomacy, culture, design, cuisine, sport and beyond". Tyler Brule, Monocle's founder and editor-in-chief, told ABC Radio National Breakfast's Fran Kelly one of the reasons Australia was ranked No 7 was because itdid very well in sport. Much of that success has been led and funded by successive Olympic campaigns.

Having worked at six Olympics, I've seen first hand the excess and euphoria delivered by the Games. It is yet to be seen if the $US51 billion spent on Sochi's new stadiums, roads and infrastructure to stage the most expensive Games in history will be white elephants.

Britain, meanwhile, is revelling in the legacy of its $US14 billion boutique summer Games, which turned one of the most depressed areas of London into a thriving metropolis.

The news from Rio, which will host the 2016 Games, has been reminiscent of Athens 2004, with tales of budget blowouts, missed deadlines and unfinished infrastructure.

A wave of panic swept over the Olympics when six cities - Munich, St Moritz-Davos, Stockholm, Krakow, Oslo and Lviv - abandoned their bids for the 2020 Winter Games, leaving Almaty in Kazakhstan and Beijing as the only contenders.

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The Games are at a crossroads and a historic meeting is being held this week in Monte Carlo to map a viable future.

Over the next two days the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will vote on 40 reforms designed to make the Games more relevant, affordable and manageable.

The reforms aim to make bidding for the Olympics cheaper and easier, hosting more sustainable and introduce new sports relevant to the host city. The Olympic Agenda 2020 reforms also include engaging younger audiences via digital platforms, establishing an Olympic broadcast channel, ensuring women make up 50 per cent of all athletes and capping the number of athletes and coaches to make the Games manageable.

It's too easy to dismiss the IOC as a club of out-of-touch old men addicted to a first-class, five-star existence. But Princess Mary's Danish husband Frederik didn't join the IOC because he needed first-class treatment and 20 per cent of the IOC's 104 members are women.

The IOC needs more women and younger recruits to join Olympic champions and IOC members including South Korean taekwondo champion Moon Dae-Sung, 38, Russian swimmer Alex Popov, 43, Cuban volleyball player Yumilka Ruiz Luaces, 36, China's short-track speed skater Yang Yang, 38, and United States ice hockey player Angela Ruggiero, 34.

These IOC members, who work for free, will vote on the Olympic Agenda 2020 reforms at an extraordinary meeting in Monte Carlo this week. The reforms have to be adopted or the Olympics, which is one of the most recognised brands in the world, will start crumbling like some great civilisation of the past.

Critics say reform and the IOC go together like democracy and China. But Thomas Bach has staked his IOC presidency on introducing them, opening the IOC and letting in a "fresh wind".

"If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change" is the most famous line in the epic 1958 Italian book The Leopard, about a 19th-century Sicilian nobleman trapped in the teeth of revolution.

The same applies to the IOC. If is to remain a pioneer in world sport that stages transformational Games, things have to change. And quickly. Or the Olympics risk going the way of the Dodo.

Louise Evans has worked at six Olympics, in Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney, Beijing, London and Sochi.

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