 Pierre de Coubertin: "The Olympic Spirit is neither the property of one race nor of one age. An influential figure in the modern Olympic movement since you ask and no I didn't know either. But Mr de Coubertin is surely correct because it is indeed hard to contemplate war and genocide as the games unfold.
Hosting the games is another subject altogether. Expensive, time-consuming, and risky are the basic and painful realities of hosting modern Olympic Games. So it is little surprise that the two dozen hosts to date have been wealthy cities within three wealthy continents: Europe, North America and Australia. Relatively poor Africa has yet to host the Olympics and somewhat poor Asia has hosted only them twice. And then it has happeend in places under significant American influence – Tokyo 1964 and Seoul 1988.
But what of the upside to the Olympics? A careful look at the numbers reveals a key relationship with urbanisation. Specifically the table below shows excerpts of United Nations population data. Compared are rates of urbanization at the time of the summer Olympics versus fifty years afterwards (forecast or actual as appropriate).
These consistently reveal one vital fact: sizable increases in urbanization follow Olympic Games. Dating back to London 1948 the urbanization rates of host nations have consistently risen afterwards. The increase is +13% on average. Admittedly this includes outliers. During the Helsinki Olympics of 1952 urbanization in Finland was a mere 32% or 1-in-3 of the population. By 2002, half-a-century later, Finnish urbanisation had jumped massively to 61%; nearly 2-in-3 Finns lived in urban environments.
Outliers also work the other way, naturally. When Spain hosted the Olympics in Barcelona 1992 urbanization was already at 75%. It is predicted to increase marginally to 82% within half-a-century but that is a much smaller increase (+7%). Yet the overall and very clear aggregated picture stands: urbanization increases after Olympics.
One other effect is striking. Curiously urbanisation rates in overall continents increase after Olympics more than host countries. This seems surprising. Surely we can expect urbanisation to be greater in hosting countries because the long-term economic gains go to them. According to the figures, though, the average rate of post-Games urbanization in continents has been +16% or about 1-in-6 of the population. Compared to the +13% for host countries that’s a notable difference when considering continents containing millions of people. |
