The ‘Olympics story’ is not something to be added on after the event has already been planned to give the bid a bit of extra promotional gloss, but rather should inform the whole project from outset to aftermath….
In this piece I argue that we should neither follow the Athens example and attempt to square the original Classical Humanist ideal with the realpolitik of Commerce and Civic Imagineering, nor take the Beijing road and use the games to bulldoze through a programme of modernisation that sacrifices local communities to global interests.
Instead we have to recognise that the Olympiad is a site of contested interests and representations, in which regional and post-national identifications play an increasing part. In arguing for a narrative of ‘contra-flows’ the article takes up this challenge in relation to some of the specific issues raised by London’s bid for the 2012 games.
In his ‘memoir’ W, George Perec describes the attempt to found a new Olympics far removed from nationalistic squabbles and ideological manoeuvres, in an island off Tierra del Fuego. This is a land where sport is King, life is lived for the greater glory of the body and the athletic vocation shapes the life of the state as well as ruling every aspect of civil society.
On the Island of W, public morality is sports morality - everything that leads to victory in the sporting competitions is good, and everything that leads to defeat is bad. A vast apparatus services the athletes and the games but those not involved directly, i.e. women, children and old men are second class citizens forced to eke out a marginal existence outside the Olympic villages.
The governance of the games covers every aspect of training, selection and competition, regulating the most intimate aspects of the athletes life, from the schooling of novices through to the final preparation of champions.
The glorification of success is expressed through grandiose ceremonies in honour of victorious athletes who are given sumptuous feasts and gifts; the losers are not only excluded from these festivities but are sent to bed without any supper! So it is not just ephemeral glory that drives the athlete on, but the need to fill the stomach. Not that losers are starved to death, they still get some rations, enough to enable them to compete but not enough to give them the energy they need to win.
Under this totalitarian regime Perec writes, in travesty of Pierre de Coubertin’s statement of the Olympic ideal:
‘The survival of the fittest is the law of this land, yet the struggle itself is nothing., it is not sport for sport’s sake which motives the athletes but thirst for victory, victory at any price.’
The founder of the Modern Olympics movement expressly stressed that what was to be ‘noble’ about his version of the Greek Games was precisely the priority of competing over winning. This was what distinguished the amateur – the one who competed for love of sport or pride in achievement, from the professional, the one who did it for private gain.
In contrast, Perec, a survivor of the Holocaust, saw in the organisation of the camps, with their daily regime of physical selections, the ultimate realisation of the ‘body fascism’ entailed in the Nazis’ racial ideal, with it’s blatant Aryanisation of Nietzsche’s ‘ubermensch’. For Perec this body politics had its roots in the Hellenic ideal that underpinned Europe’s definition of itself and its ‘others’, and more specifically in the authoritarianism of Plato’s Republic.
In this he was undoubtedly influenced by the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and in particular Leni Riefenstahl’s film of it. The film is, if nothing else, a hymn to the athlete’s body and its physical perfection as expressing a ‘triumph of the will’ over human frailty.
Riefenstahl went on to make documentaries about African physical culture which entailed a similar aesthetic idealisation. And indeed there is a strong connection between the romantic ideal of the body sublime and the racist model of the body’s immaculate conception in the aesthetic code which permeated the upper reaches of European culture from the late 18 th century onwards.
This aristocratic vision of the athletic body, liberated from any link to the ‘degradations’ of its physical functions, especially those of manual labour, very readily tied in with a rediscovery of the ‘ glory that was Greece’.
Classical Greek culture as adumbrated by the Victorian Hellenists, and taught in the English public school and German gymnasium system, was a template for the transmission of the Imperial manly virtues, combining the ‘active life’ with the ‘civilising mission’. Sport – and especially the modern Olympics- was simply regarded as a privileged arena in which these virtues could be practised.
Perec’s thesis, that there is an intimate ‘bio-political’ link between modern totalitarianism and the regimes of training and performance associated with success at the Olympics, is thus not as far fetched as it may seem.
Others have made the connection between the homo-erotic ideals of masculinity and male bonding favoured by the social organisation of Ancient Greece and celebrated in the original Olympics games, and the militarised corps d’esprit adopted as the civil foundation of Fascism’s (and some would argue Communism’s) corporate state in the 20 th century.
Certainly Communism’s Promethean ideal of the proletarian body, freed from the toils of oppression through the conjoint disciplines of organised labour and sport, has played a major role in shaping the spectacle of the modern Olympiads, not least in the choreography of its opening ceremonies.
This was not quite what Baron de Coubertin had in mind when he set out to reformulate the Olympic ideal for modern times. For him the aim of the Games was to re-articulate the values of classical humanism, values that transcended divisions of race, class, religion and culture, to the project of promoting greater international harmony and understanding.
For him the fact that the ever warring Greek city states declared a truce so that the games could take place, was their cardinal virtue. His hope was that through the bringing together of youth in sporting contest nation would learn to speak peace unto nation. Yet he did also ally these ‘noble’ virtues to an explicitly amateur and implicitly aristocratic ethos. When a butcher won the 100 yards dash in the 1898 Olympics there was consternation, and membership of the National Olympics teams was hastily confined to those who had a university education!
If the Modern Olympics can be told as a tale of progress, it can only be about the increasing democratisation of the games beyond their original ‘Hellenic’ conception, limited as it has been to an educated Western elite.
But this has been a double-edged process. For the modernisers, the opening up of the games has been inextricably bound up with growing professionalisation of athletics and the commercialisation of the games. For the Olympic traditionalists the profane drives governing the micro-politics and economics of competitive world sport are at best necessary evils, whose effect should as far as possible be minimised by focussing the Olympics story on the ‘human angle’ of youth.
It has been very difficult, in fact, to uncouple the meaning of the modern Olympics from its implication in the narrative role of Hellenic ideal as a founding myth of European civilisation and its alleged superiority. And that ideal has come under increasing attack. First and foremost for it’s promotion of a Eurocentric definition of culture ( including sporting culture).
The charge is that the Victorian Hellinists, most of whom were German or English, ignored the Egyptian roots of Classical Greek culture in favour of their own version of Aryanism or Anglo saxonism. It was the Egyptians, after all, who first invented competitive play and social games, features which Huizinga saw as the defining characteristic of civilised society – namely the ability to sublimate naked aggression in ludic forms.
More recently there has been an unholy alliance between Islamic and Christian fundamentalists to denounce Classical Antiquity as a hotbed of institutionalised paedophilia and general moral degeneracy. In so far as the core sports of the Olympics continue to involve athletic practices associated with the Greek gymnasium then, in this view, they remain the work of the devil. On top of which there is now the widespread use of performance enhancing drugs, tampering with the body’s divine chemistry…..
There is no doubt that these attacks, however wild or wide of the mark, have taken their toll. The Hellenic ideal is badly tarnished. The official story line of the Athens Olympiad talked of the ‘games coming home’, uniting the best of the ancient and modern traditions, but one of the official internet sites claimed that what these traditions have in common is precisely drugs, cheating and diplomatic intrigue ! The events that marked the opening of the Athens Games were to prove all too dramatically that this indeed was the common thread.
Over the last thirty years an alternative narrative has emerged in which capitalist modernity, not humanistic tradition is the name of the games. The Olympics are now largely promoted as an engine of social and technical progress, a means of regenerating the urban infrastructure of deprived metropolitan regions, or bringing ‘backward’ third world countries into the sphere of the global neo liberal economy. The Athens story, for example, emphasised the upgrades the games will bring in terms of improved transport, jobs and housing, as well as in sports and leisure facilities and the long lasting legacy in terms of mass tourism (though we might think Athens could be spared more of that!).
The success or failure of the contemporary Olympics is measured almost exclusively by such profane performance indicators. Qualitative indices, viz the quality of experience enjoyed by competitors and visitors, the non material costs or benefits to host communities, including the aesthetic pleasures associated with great architecture and environmental landscaping, these factors do not feature nearly so much in the official record.
Where modernisation is defined in purely material terms, then urban ecologies that do not fit into this picture come to be seen as impediments to progress, and are in danger of being bulldozed out of the way, creating resentments that may become a permanent legacy of the games.
The narrative currently being constructed for the Beijing Olympics of 2008 dramatises some of these conflicts. The quest for ‘New Beijing, Great Olympics’ has been broken down into three elements ‘Green Olympics, Hi tech Olympics and People’s Olympics’.
In practice, however, ecological approaches and hi tech solutions are not easily reconciled, either with each other or with the conservation of popular cultural heritage. The ‘hutong’ area of Beijing, justly celebrated for its vernacular architecture, which has housed new arrivants to the city for over a century and also provided an ecological niche for the city’s wildlife, this whole area is being almost totally demolished to make way for new developments, leaving only a small part as a token ‘ heritage site’.
There are also conflicting idioms of ‘modernisation’in play.The language of the Beijing prospectus combines a distinctly old fashioned version of politbureaucratese
(‘Thanks to the leadership of the Party Central Committee and the State council and the support of all the Chinese people, we will ensure that the Beijing Games is the Greatest Olympics so far’) with the latest managerialist jargon derived from new age capitalism.
The two discourses come together in one chilling section of the prospectus which talks of the drive to ‘eradicate unwholesome, unhygienic and anti social practices’ amongst the Beijing population in order to ensure that China presents its best, most modern, face to the world. One can imagine that the authorities are afraid that the city’s hidden economy(not only prostitution and drugs, but everything banned by the regime) will be likely to flourish during the Olympics, and that they will undertake a pre-emptive strike to close it down by arresting and imprisoning anyone suspected of ‘non authorised trading’.
Whatever the specifics of national context, the body politics of the Olympics pivots on a global contradiction, or rather on a contradiction of globalisation. In the advanced, knowledge based, economies of the West, the industrial regime that throughout most of the 20 th century provided a metaphor and model for the measurement of sporting achievement has become all but obsolete. Nevertheless the time and motion studies pioneered by Fordism continue to be retained in the sphere of sports science; here success is still largely motivated and measured by bio-energetic principles of performance.
In contrast the popular multiculture of urban athleticism that has emerged over the last quarter century in the metropolitan heartlands of Western capitalism has evolved its own highly stylised aesthetic. Hip hop and skateboarding are now the main field and track events on the streets and playgrounds of East London.
Even those Olympic sports which historically formed a core element in popular narratives of aspiration, especially amongst immigrant and disadvantaged communities, are declining in terms of their levels of participation, if not spectatorship. At the same time the majority of people in the West no longer labour with their bodies, and increasing numbers, especially the young, are growing fat on a sedentary consumerist life style, creating a major new health problem.
In the rest of the world it is a very different story. Here millions of bodies continue to be broken by poverty, hunger, famine, disease, wars, lack of basic facilities, and terrible working conditions. Yet in these countries, popular participation in sports that require little in the way of equipment and facilities is growing exponentially. Most of these countries however lack the economic infrastructure that would enable them to host the Olympics, as presently constituted. So there is a growing polarisation between two quite distinct body politics. Somehow or other the Olympics movement has to find a way of addressing this contradiction and bridging what we might call the analogic divide.
The argument so far has suggested that the Olympics are an invented, and constantly re-invented tradition and one that is highly contested. The issue is no longer primarily about ‘modernising’ the Hellenic ideal but about constructing a credible narrative of modernity itself. The question then becomes which (or whose) modernity are we talking about?
It seems, at first sight, as if capitalism is the only game in town. Olympic bids are about which city can put on the best show for the world media, and deliver the infrastructural projects that will make it all work on the ground. So global mediascape and local ethnoscape have to be put together into a single integrated package. One out of two won’t do.
Self evidently then the ‘grand project’ that is the Olympics, requires a grand narrative to legitimate it. But this is precisely where the problems start. In times and places where ideas about human progress, linked to science, technology and ‘civilisation’ are common sense, there is not any great difficulty – and hence not much additional effort - in embedding large scale civic projects within some such story line. The very fact that today this has become a specialised branch of cultural industry, employing a whole army of public relations consultants, shows that these links are no longer so easy to make. They have, in all senses of the word, to be forged anew.
With the growth of ‘urban imagineering’, civic narrative has become more and more mediatised and reduce to ‘spin’. In order to sell your ‘product’ you have a ‘good story line’. Moreover the insistence of the IOC on monitoring newspaper reports related to Olympics bids as a way of assessing the degree of popular support the host communities, puts a premium on the use of PR techniques to manipulate, or at least ‘impression manage’ public opinion.
The resulting narratives, whether relayed in the form of an extended advertising poster or TV campaign, or news stories embedded in media reportage, or simply logos and straplines designed to brand the Olympics package, all entail compressing the story line drastically in space and time until it almost reaches vanishing point.
However the more reduced the format, the more it relies on the existence of shared cultural repertoires and perspectives to get the message across.
Unless these condensed statements can be unpacked and elaborated by their intended recipients into coherent narratives then the audience just wont get it. There is no problem where the message itself is unproblematic ( buy this and you’ll feel great) ; restricted codes are good at communicating and reinforcing shared assumptions ( everyone wants to feel good).
But the Olympics is not a brand like this and, I’ve suggested, the marketing of a bid can no longer rely on consensual definitions of what the Olympics means or represents.
So the Olympics story cannot be simply reiterative. It has to be given a twist that will give the bid a competitive edge. At the same time this ‘re-invention’ has to conform to the basic narrative of the Olympics as formulaically condensed in the Olympic Oath and. to be downloadable into a full blown voxpop story.
In the official IOC narrative it is the record of sporting actions that forms the backbone of the story; as related on it’s website, this consists of a selective sampling of exploits used to illustrate the Olympic concepts of noble competition: the athlete who overcame serious injury to win his event against all the odds; the black and white African sprinters who join hands in a victory lap to symbolise the overcoming of Apartheid ; the youngest ever swimmer to win gold ; the first Pakistani to compete in the pentathlon and so on.
Yet no matter how triumphalist the account the central question raised by Perec remains. Does the Olympic Ideal contain within itself the seeds of it’s own corruption, or are the negative elements which surface in this or that Games introduced contingently by external forces who try to exploit the competition for their own political or economic benefit?
It is not a question confined to the Olympics of course, but it is posed with peculiar poignancy here. And it motivates people to return again and again to interrogate the founding myth, and evaluate the story so far in that light.
After every Olympics there is just such a reckoning, and the Olympics movement itself goes through periodic crises of self doubt. Yet because none of this agonising is allowed to leak into the authorised version of the story line, it appears in stories of what goes on behind the scenes: dramas of political intrigue, rumours about bribery and corruption, doping scandals, panics about security threats, gossip and innuendo about the private, especially sexual, lives of the athletes, and so on. It is through these narratives of the Olympics ‘other scene’ that the fundamental questions about the nature and meaning of the Games comes to be addressed.
So there is no easy squaring of the circle. No matter how persuasive the rhetorics, however spectacular the sporting spectacle, the success of a Games depends on something outside the spin: does this particular instalment of the Olympics story articulate something that can be represented in these highly specific terms about how the host society and culture are positioned in the wider world?
Or, alternatively, does a particular form of staging successfully represent something that is still to be articulated positively about the Olympic ideal in relation to a specific context and conjuncture?
If an Olympiad does either or both of these things then the mega-event will catch the mood of the people, and find a niche in the collective memory. If not, not. The Festival of Britain in 1951 was a success, because it dramatised a widespread sense that it was time to move on from the age of wartime austerity, to open up new horizons, as epitomised in the Dome of Discovery. Half a century later, the Millennium Festival was a failure because it did not articulate the popular desire for change associated with the election of 1998.
So it will not be enough for London 2012 to achieve a suspension of public disbelief in our ability to win the bid and deliver the games. To ‘work’ the narrative has to find something that has yet to be fully articulated in and by the Olympics, which is also representative of the place which East London occupies in the (global) media and (local) ethno-scape.
This means we have to de-mythologise and de-ideologise the Olympics Story and create a narrative framework that enables us for interrogate its special effects. We have to match the physical capacity to design and deliver the infrastructure with an equally sophisticated set of symbolic resources for dealing with the troublesome body politics.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song
Sweet Thames run softly for I speak not loud or long
T.S. Eliot The Waste Land
Maybe downflowing water has an upcurrent nobody knows
Alice Oswald The Dart
No-one can step into the same river twice
Heraclitus
The LDDC’s slogan ‘ going with the flow’ was meant to link the regeneration of Docklands with the advent of a new economy based upon global flows, not just of labour and capital, but of knowledge and information. The use of metaphors derived from rivers and the sea, and in particular the imagery of tidal flows and ebbs, to map the circulation of commodities, the movement of markets or the migration of peoples, is an unsurprising device in a small island which was once the hub of a world wide maritime empire. But in the era of global information economy it is one that has had its day.
The unidirectional emphasis, ( rivers officially only flow one way !) serves to underwrite a now obsolescent model of cultural exchange based on the centre/periphery relations generated by Imperial trade. Here information flows can only either be centripetal or centrifugal; there is no space or time allowed for the phenomenon of contra-flows. But the fact is that the Internet has no periphery and its centre is everywhere Even if the Digital Divide (i.e. between those who have and have not, access to the Internet) creates its own forms of unequal exchange, these are not spatialised in the same old way.
And whether we are talking about diasporic re-configurations of virtual community, or the forecasting of world commodity markets we are dealing with complex non linear systems, systems whose vectors of growth or decline are irregular, multidirectional and follow branching pathways; this is as far away from the fluctuating equilibria of tidal flows as you can possibly get!
If we were to look for an analogy in the philosophy of classical Antiquity it would have to be found in the model of life- as- flux proposed by Heraclitus. Against the fixed categories of Aristotelian logic, centred on the notion of unilinear causality, Heraclitus argued that every flow of energy releases a myriad of counter curnts, whose Law is not uniform motion, but ceaseless difference. But if we were to go with this kind of model, the Olympics story would have to adopt a new strategy for articulating what it represents.
The distinctions made between Olympic and non Olympic sports are largely arbitrary. The process whereby one sport gets recognised and another does not is a function of the power exercised by particular interest groupings within the Olympics movement. In contrast, the family resemblances between different kinds of sporting activity cut across many of these distinctions.
Considered formally, that is as sequence of actions performed by individuals or groups upon physical objects or environments using particular bodily skills and apparatus to overcome obstacles and achieve a competitive goal according to certain rules - mountain climbing has more in common with sailing than sailing has with swimming, and hip hop has more in common with hop skip and jump, than running has with hurdling.
While no-one is suggesting that these synergies should provide the basis on which sports should be selected and grouped for the Olympics, it does offer a way of reporting the Games that connects what is going on there to a whole range of other human activities, and to the people who take part in them.
For this purpose conventional sports journalism needs to be supplemented by more creative reportage and Olympics residencies established for writers, poets and visual artists across a wide range of idioms and genres.
Such an approach also points to a potential space of interaction between competitors and spectators, in which the activities of shouting, cheering, singing, hand clapping, foot stomping and arm or flag waving can take on more inventive forms than Mexican waves. Rap could be a prime medium for this to-ing and fro-ing since it is a form of verbal athleticism that combines the art of story telling with the techniques of bodily performance. Olympic rapsters should be an important feature of the Games, with every venue, and every sporting discipline spoken for in their ranks.
The new uncertainty principles created by global warming and international terrorism will inevitably provide a focus for much of the planning for 2012.
By that time, unless preventative measures are in place, sudden tidal surges will put many estuary cities at risk; the Lower Lea Valley may well become an ‘underwater city’ and much of Thames Gateway will once again become a flood plain…..
Going with the contraflow is this context means conserving and managing marshlands as front line coastal defences, creating traffic systems that reduce rather than increase carbon emissions, designing buildings that offer protection from the changing environmental and climactic conditions, and using recycled material and sustainable energy systems in their construction.
All this has direct implications for site planning and architecture vis a vis the Olympics stadium and village, of course. One proposal that the London Olympic sites should be linked by a network of cycle paths supported by the provision of an estimated 10,000 free bicycles to visitors to ensure their maximum use, is a first step in the right direction..
A more difficult problem to tackle is that of security. No one wants a ‘Fortress Olympics’ yet both athletes and spectators need a safe environment. The danger is that risk management drives the whole enterprise and stifles the aleatory principles that alone make the games a joyful occasion worth remembering.
Probably the best insurance policy against attack from Al Quaeda and allied terrorist groups is to have a very strong representation from London’s very large Muslim community attending the games. The good news is that many of them will be living on the doorstep. The bad news is that there is much in contemporary Olympics culture that alienates devout Muslims.
The fact that the public consultation exercise in East London took place at time when Muslims could not attend the meetings, is not a good augury for the future. To tackle this problem requires that a very specific twist be given to the London Olympics story line.
The 2008 Beijing games are being widely presented as part of China’s opening to the West. The London Olympiad should return the compliment and present itself as an opening to the East. This narrative in contraflow will locate the 2012 games at once in the specifics of a unique cultural geography and history and in the complex process of its social and economic transformation.
The East End of London has commonly been regarded as an ‘Internal Orient’, not only on account of it’s large Chinese, Malaysian, Vietnamese, Bangladeshi., Pakistani and Indian populations, but because of the way it has been so frequently juxtaposed to the West End. Whether the contrast has been struck in terms of concentrations of poverty and wealth/power, cultures of backbreaking toil and conspicuous consumption, or lives of moral depravity and public rectitude, it has always been officially a tale of two cities, even though the contraflow of unofficial traffic between them has grown in volume and intensity all the while.
For most of the 20 th century London’s economic growth went westwards, and it has only been in the last 20 years, since the closure of the Docks, that the direction of investment has shifted it’s centre of gravity eastwards, firstly to Canary Wharf, and now to Stratford and the Thames Gateway. London’s eastwards turn, and the complex patterns of ethnic gentrification and white flight that this has set in motion are transforming the political and cultural geography of the metropolis.
This unprecedented convergence of elite cosmopolitanism and popular multiculturalism, coupled with a dispersal of racist practices over a wider range, in an area for so long blighted by the legacy of Industry and Empire, this new conjuncture sets the scene for the staging of London 2012 Olympics.
It is a commonplace that the Olympics is supposed to carry the torch for multiculturalism in sport, but often only fans the flame of nationalistic and ethnocentric prejudice. The poesis of multiculturalism is usually focussed around the issue of inclusivity. The supporters of Sumo argue that it should be included alongside Greek wrestling; the advocates of Asian Kick Boxing insist their Martial Art is as deserving of recognition as the European pugilistic sports. And so on.
However underpinning these negotiations is a very old fashioned multicultural aesthetic, first articulated programmatically in the 18th century by Alexander Pope:
Not chaos like together crush’s and bruised
but as the world, harmoniously confused
where Order in Variety we see
and where, tho’ all things differ, all agree.
Pope was nothing if not a classicist. He saw in the Hellenic Idea a principle of order that could contain variety and ensure that difference did not lead to discord. Translated into the language of contemporary cultural politics, this means that Authority establishes the limit’s and conditions of popular participation ( who gets to play by their rules) while the People ( alias the Athletes and Spectators) provide sufficient local ‘colour’ to make it into an entertaining spectacle.
To break with this invented tradition requires that we begin to think outside these particular boxes, to focus on issues of difference and equality, and the fact that the Olympics Games never have taken place on a level playing field. Going with the contraflow, in this context, means locating the Olympics narrative firmly within the travelling stories of the global diasporas which have brought millions of displaced people, as refugees and Asylum seekers from East to West. The symbolic journey of the torch from Mount Olympus across the world to the host city has thus to be retold in these terms : it will be a yarn made up of many threads, an open weave whose strength comes from just that fact.
The Thames as it flows from West to East through London is a perfect attractor for these voices in contraflow. Once the main artery of Britains imperial trade, and home from home to sailors from around the globe, this waterfront is increasingly reconstituting itself as a landscape of post colonial memory spanning a multitude of stories. The opportunities this opens up are well illustrated by Fred D’Aguiar, one of our leading Black British poets, who stands on Waterloo Bridge and writes :
I saw these waves
roping off into strand
that combine to make a fat rope
breaking on mud banks and turning pebbles
But the strands formed ropes of their own
and before I could name what they were
the ingenious head to which they were plaited
reared up from the tide, widening rings
that marked new heights on the South Bank
Right then Marley he start to skank
his big steps threatened to make the water
break it’s banks, Barrier or no barrier
this was the dance of the warrior
the more he stamped the lower in the water he sank
until his dreadlocks returned to the waves I mistook
for plait’s doing and undoing themselves.
This is a prime example of writing in contraflow. D’Aguiar rephrases the music of the Imperial river as it has featured in much of English poetry, from Edmund Spenser's triumphalist celebration in Epithalamion Thames is down to T.S. Eliot's more muted invocation in the Waste Land and makes the waves dance to another rhythm.
Through the special alchemy of 'dread', the iconic figure of Bob Marley is transformed into a river god, the syncopated street beats of reggae transmuted into an elemental but irregular tidal force, ceaselessly doing and undoing itself, as the Rastaman's locks merge with waves that Britannia no longer rules - waves of sound which do not break on any shore, but obey the laws of Heraclitean flux.
In suggesting the adoption of this narrative paradigm, I am not just talking about the construction of the 2012 Olympic story line, as such ; the paradigm should also inform every aspect of the Game’s design, from visual artefacts such as banners or athletic clothing to the choreography of the opening and closing ceremonies; it should apply to the writing of an Olympic rap/ popular anthem, and the organisation of a cultural festival around the Games ; above all it should shape the physical planning and the overall urban design strategy, including the architectural and environmental solutions.
Going with the Contraflow could be a winning formula for London’s bid, making it stand out against the rival bids of New York and Paris, because of its power to address the underlying issues of representation posed by the contemporary Olympic movement and its ability to articulate them in relation to the site specifics issues raised by the proposed location in East London.
Professor Phil Cohen is executive director of the London East Research Institute where his main responsibility is developing a funded programme of scholarship in the community with special reference to the Thames Gateway Regeneration Plan.
© 2004·05
“The Olympics is supposed to carry the torch for multiculturalism in sport, but often it fans the flame of nationalistic and ethnocentric prejudice”
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