Page 44 - THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE’S ACCOUNTABILITY FOR HARMFUL CONSEQUENCES OF THE OLYMPIC GAMES- A MULTI-METHOD INTERNATIONAL LEGAL ANALYSIS Ryan Gautier

Chapter Two – Global Governance and Legitimacy
Hosting the Olympic Games has also been used as a component of nation-building, discussed further in Chapter Four.47 While sport is arguably not ‘high politics’, the large number of people who participate in sport, the hundreds of millions who watch the Olympic Games on television,48 the financial impact of sport,49 and state demand to host the Olympic Games, demonstrate that sport cannot be dismissed as insignificant.
The Olympic Movement enjoys a nigh-monopolistic position in sport. It is unlikely that alternative regulatory sport actors will be created by states, or other entities, given the immense costs associated with competing with a regulatory monopoly. The same can be said about the Olympic Games. A variety of competitors to the Olympic Games, launched in response to particular grievances with the IOC and the Olympics, have come- and-gone. The Women’s Olympics and the Workers’ Olympics competitions ran during the 1920s and 1930s as a counter to the upper- and middle-class male-dominated Olympic Games.50 The 1960s saw the short-lived Games of the New Emerging Forces (‘GANEFO’), held in protest of the IOC’s slower-than-hoped inclusion of post-colonial countries into the Olympic Movement.51 The Goodwill Games were first held in 1986, launched by Ted Turner (owner of the Turner Broadcasting System and the Cable News Network (‘CNN’)) after the boycotts of the 1980 and 1984 Summer Olympic Games. They too were not long for this world, cancelled after the 2001 edition. These events proved to be effective in highlighting grievances with the IOC and the Olympic Games, and often led the IOC to adopt changes, such as increasing the role of women in the Olympic Games, or including post-colonial countries in the Olympic Movement. However, that none of these
47 David R. Black and Janis van der Westhuizen, ‘The Allure of Global Games for ‘Semi-Peripheral’ Polities and Spaces: A Research Agenda’ (2004) 25 Third World Quarterly 1195, 1198; Scarlett Cornelissen, ‘The Geopolitics of Global Aspiration: Sport Mega-Events and Emerging Powers’ (2010) 27 The International Journal of the History of Sport 3007, 3013.
48 The IOC has projected that 3.6 billion people watched at least one minute of the 2012 Olympics broadcast. Sponsorship Intelligence, ‘London 2012 Olympic Games: Global Broadcast Report’ (2012) 4. Andrew Zimbalist has cited studies that critique these numbers as inflated, but acknowledges that the worldwide audience of the Olympic Games (and FIFA World Cup) is enormous, even if the numbers are exaggerated. Zimbalist (n 11) ch 4, loc 1001.
49 For instance, sport represented 3.7% of EU GDP in 2004. European Commission, ‘Competition: Sports, Overview’ <http://ec.europa.eu/competition/sectors/sports/overview_en.html> accessed 13 May 2015.
50 Roche (n 16) 94. See also Kevin B. Wamsley, ‘The Global Sport Monopoly: A Synopsis of 20th Century Olympic Politics’ (2002) 57 International Journal 395, 399.
51 Cornelissen (n 47) 3012.
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