Dr. Yoav Dubinsky
Senior Instructor of sports business in the Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon. His research focuses on sports, nation branding and public diplomacy, especially in the contexts of international sports and the Olympic Movement. He covered or researched five Olympic Games from Beijing, London, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, and Paris. He is the author of the book Nation Branding and Sports Diplomacy: Country Image Games in Times of Change.
Email: yoavd@uoregon.edu
Twitter: @YoavDubinsky
Following research in Japan on Tokyo 2020, I published my reflections in Place Branding & Public Diplomacy,referring the postponed Olympic Games as a beginning of new era of the Olympic Movement. I classified it as a survival-oriented era, emphasizing how the International Olympic Committee (IOC) kept changing its own protocols for practicality purposes to be able to hold Olympic Games and secure the future of the Movement. A few months later, IOC President Thomas Bach used the words “new era” when marking two years to Paris 2024, setting the upcoming Olympic Games in France as the starting point. Either way, the Olympic Movement is going through a fundamental change. Through Paris 2024, during press conferences and public speeches, Bach repeated and reiterated that these Olympic Games mark a beginning of a new era of the Olympic Movement. The Games ended with Bach himself announcing he will not seek to modify the Olympic Charter to run for reelection and in 2025 a new IOC president will be elected, as “new times are calling for new leaders”.
Bach’s main legacy as a proactive IOC President is the creation, launching and implementation of Olympic Agenda 2020 – 40 strategic recommendations about the future of the Olympic Movement from 2014. They were updated in the 2021 version – Olympic Agenda 2020+5. These recommendations also enabled more flexibility in the bidding process. The 2024 Olympic bid was the first one that started after launching Agenda 2020 and ended with an unprecedented decision to award the next two Olympic Games at the same time; Paris to host the Olympic Games in 2024 and Los Angeles in 2028. Since then, the bidding process was further revised into a dialogue system and just before the start of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games the IOC awarded the French Alps and Salt Lake City the Winter Olympic Games in 2030 and 2034 respectively, assuming both hosts will meet the pre-requirements. The joint award and the dialogue system give IOC leadership and bidding cities more flexibility and control in the bidding process, yet it also receives criticism for lack of transparency. Thus, from the bidding perspective, Paris 2024 is the first product of Agenda 2020 that is changing the Olympic Movement.
From a delivery perspective, Paris 2024 is also unique in the sense of diffusion of venues beyond the host city and reducing the dependency on the Olympic Village. It was common even before Paris 2024 to have the football tournament across the country and the sailing competitions in a different port-city if the host city did not have an equitable beach. Paris 2024 went beyond that, having the basketball group stages and the handball knockout stages in Lille, the shooting competitions at Chateauroux and the surfing competition in Tahiti, the French Polynesian island in the Pacific Ocean. These exemplify multiple opportunities for flexible and sustainable hosting that reduce the need of new permanent venues and enable more satellite cities or even more countries or regions opportunities to take part in hosting Olympic competitions beyond the main host city.
Beyond the bidding and hosting flexibilities, Paris 2024 also embodied challenges and forced changes the Olympic Movement will be facing moving forward. Climate change, heat waves in the summer, and shorter winters that reduce the number of potential hosting countries, are now immediate threats that impact every host city. The technological developments, from dependency on social media and record breaking exposure of the Olympic Games to the strategic use of artificial intelligence (AI), were manifested in Paris 2024 through using AI to detect and delete online cyberbullying. Creating the Olympic Esports Games and having the first ones in Saudi Arabia in 2025 reflects the digital and technological change, more countries playing leading roles in the Olympic Movement and trying to attract younger generations. There are social and political demographic shifts with ideological preferences and values of younger audiences, which reflects in the types of competitions held during the Olympic Games and in the question of free speech and activism. While in Tokyo 2020 the IOC created a space for athletes to kneel prior to competitions, in Paris 2024, despite a contested geopolitical climate, most social political demonstrations were left outside the field of play.
Since the implementation of Agenda 2020 in 2014 and through Paris 2024, Thomas Bach kept repeating the mantra about the Olympic Movement “change or be changed”. After turbulent Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022 that were held under COVID-19 restrictions and during a divisive geopolitical climate, Paris 2024 were the Games the Olympic Movement needed. Paris 2024 was held mostly in existing or temporary facilities, exposing the iconic venues of the city along with its global appeal and the diverse local population and culture, while also celebrating gender parity, and overall held without major geopolitical disruptions and stayed true to the branding “Games Wide Open”. Paris 2024 was not without faults, nor is it a copy-paste template. Yet, in the sense of a new era, the Games showed how Agenda 2020 can be interpreted to successfully host the Olympics. Now it is up to the IOC, next hosts, and other Olympic stakeholders to authentically capitalize on these future opportunities. Or as Bach said in his concluding press briefing of the 2024 Olympic Games: “If L.A. would like to copy the Eiffel Tower, it would be a recipe for disaster”.
