Tourism Research Links

Olympics Related Research

[Prepared by Geoff Reid, REM Graduate Student]

Gateway Sites

  1. TorontoSummerGames.com - The 2008 Olympic Bid Information Site: www.torontosummergames.com. TSG.com is an independent website focusing not only on the 2008 Olympic Bid process but also other future bids as well. The site publishes features and original articles and stories not available elsewhere online. Their membership includes the world media, members of bid city committees around the world, IOC officials and members as well as Olympic fans, businesses and athletes. It contains daily news updates compiled through media sources throughout the world. In addition, the site acts as a good starting location to link to bid sites for the 2008 and 2012 Summer Games as well as the 2010 Winter Games, as well as containing links to more research-oriented sites. The site also contains a highly visited discussion board with forums related to the 2008 and upcoming bids. While being relatively easy to navigate, the site has a tendency to be visually cluttered, especially on main pages. As advertising supports the site, the banners also contribute to the overall aesthetic busyness. Having operated for about three years, it is one of the best sources on the web for news and for links to other sites related to the Olympics.
  2. Light the Fire Within - The Governor's Music and Education Program: www.lightwithin.org/olylinks.html. This site is the Internet component of Governor of Utah Michael Leavitt's programme to provide "Utah K-12 students with a foundation of Olympic values through music and curriculum" in preparation for Salt Lake City's hosting of the 2002 Winter Games. The Olympic Links Page of the site provides excellent links to more research oriented sites and is a good navigation guide for Olympics research. It has a clean, minimalist and well-designed aesthetic with good use of graphics and white space. The links are well organized with critical, clear and concise commentary that is useful. While not entirely comprehensive, the site has provided the most substantive links for an online researcher.
  3. The Great Olympic Swindle - Olympic Links: ajennings.8m.com/links.htm. This links page provides an all-inclusive list of sites related to organizations and individuals critical of the Olympics, as well as recent news and articles or article series on problems related to the Games. The site's creator is Andrew Jennings, a well-known journalist who has written a series of books investigating the IOC and the Olympic 'movement'. The site, well not particularly graphically well-designed or interesting, is very easy to navigate. The links page operates as a nerve center on the pulse of the online anti-Olympic opposition and provides the researcher with the links necessary for alternative points of view. The rest of the site can perhaps be viewed primarily as an advertisement for Jennings' books.

Other Sites

  1. The Olympic Studies Centre and International Chair in Olympism at the University of Barcelona: http://www.blues.uab.es/olympic.studies/index.html. This trilingual site in English, Catalan and Spanish is fairly comprehensive. It includes books and working papers that you can purchase online, and also has many online documents on topics related to Olympic Studies. The site is reasonably well-designed and graphically pleasing, if not brilliantly so; but is not easy to navigate with inconsistent page headings and intrasite links. Perhaps the component of the site most useful to researchers is an online database. The "Olympic Studies International Directory" is searchable by author, institution, country or subject area. Given that the Directory is co-sponsored by the IOC's Olympic Museum, it surprisingly also includes Olympic scholars critical of the Games. Searches produce contact information on Olympic scholars and their research and publications that is very useful for further online, as well as library, research.
  2. The International Centre for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario: http://www.uwo.ca/olympic/index.html. This site is useful primarily for providing information on the Centre's activities, events, and publications. It does not provide much online documentation, and but provides limited bibliographic information related to its academic journal "Olympika". The site's graphics and navigability are average and it contains a design sensibility that verges upon being dated. However, given that the Centre appears to have very limited support from the University, it has developed a fairly respectable website.
  3. The University of Technology, Sydney - Working Towards Your Future in Sydney 2000 http://www.olympic.uts.edu.au/index.html. The UTS website documents the community projects undertaken in Sydney to supplement the Games as well as including a annotated bibliography with a myriad of publications by UTS community members under a diverse and wide-ranging list of topic headings. The site is simple, yet elegantly and very professionally well-designed and graphically pleasing and extremely easy to navigate.
  4. The Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles www.aafla.com. The AAF possesses one of the world's largest collections of Olympics related material and is currently undertaking an ambitious effort to convert large amounts of its collected works into digital format. This excellent reference site is very well designed and easy to navigate, with the possible exception of its frames format restricting the amount of onscreen viewable material a bit too much. There appears to be a very large amount of Olympic related material available in Acrobat/pdf format, but unfortunately the virtual archives were closed for maintenance at the time this is written, so I was unable to utilize this feature. Overall however this is perhaps the best website for Olympic researchers looking for online secondary research.
  5. Olympic Museum Lausanne www.museum.olympic.org. This is the online site for the Olympic Museum located in Lausanne, Switzerland within the International Olympic Committee's headquarters complex. This site, (part of the IOC's official website), is extremely well designed and easy to navigate, and exemplifies the tremendous financial and info tech resources available to the IOC. The most relevant section of the site for researchers is the "Olympics Studies Centre", which is the repository of the Historical Archives, the Documentation Centre, and the Library, which have varying levels of access to the public. There is little online documentation beyond a link to the online directory of the Library's collection, but the site provides good access to communicate with researchers at the museum, who will provide the first two hours of their time for free.
  6. Bread not Circuses - a coalition of groups concerned about Toronto's 2008 Olympic Bid: www.breadnotcircuses.org. Bread not Circuses' website includes online articles and essays on mega-event impacts and the Olympics by leading Canadian and international journalists and scholars. The site is not well designed or graphically pleasing, but perhaps this is not unexpected given the very limited financial resources of BnC. However, despite the site's aesthetic limitations, the online essays provide good background for researchers interested in a critical perspective of the Olympics and its potential impacts upon urban areas.