Olympics Related Research
[Prepared by Geoff Reid, REM Graduate Student]
Gateway Sites
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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