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Keywords: Olympics

  • AUSTRALIA

    Who benefits from Olympic billions?

    • Sarah Klenbort
    • 07 February 2023
    4 Comments

    As Brisbane prepares to host the 2032 Olympics and Paralympics, housing affordability remains a pressing issue. With more residents now facing homelessness, the question arises: with vast amounts of taxpayer money being spent on Olympics infrastructure, how will Brisbane address the homelessness crisis?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The normality of Olympic brutality

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 28 February 2022
    7 Comments

    For anybody surprised about those ‘marquee tent’ moments, as an ABC journalist crudely termed them, the Olympics is as much about torment as it is about achievement. The torment is very much reserved for the athlete, the achievement reserved for officialdom and media and spectator consumption. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The surprising joys of the Olympics in lockdown

    • Brenna Dempsey
    • 14 September 2021

    I have never paid much attention to the Olympics or Paralympics. The games always seemed too patriotic while simultaneously being too individualistic. Plus, I don’t enjoy watching people push themselves so hard for something to the point where they need to throw up. That said, I’m in Melbourne in lockdown, I’m working from home, and living alone and I need to have something on in the background while I work, or I feel too lonely. If I play music, I get distracted. So I decided to tune into the games and have them on in the background, volume low, to see if it helped me focus.

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  • CARTOON

    The long run

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 10 August 2021

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  • CARTOON

    Going for gold

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 05 August 2021
    1 Comment

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Japan's Olympic dream disrupts disaster recovery

    • Pepi Ronalds
    • 06 March 2017
    3 Comments

    This week marks the anniversary of the triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown) that hit northern Japan on 11 March 2011. The event took over 18,000 lives, and initially displaced 470,000 people. Six years on, 127,000 are still without a permanent home. Delays have been caused by the sheer physical scope, pre-existing regulations and other restrictions. These are all understandable. What is less easy to accept are the disruptions caused by the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Luckily for Australia, winning really isn't everything

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 22 August 2016
    9 Comments

    Australia appears likely to fall well short of its pre-games medal target. This has led to criticism of the government's funding strategy, which has seen money poured into elite sports where Australia has traditionally been most successful or where medals seemed most likely. This approach inevitably leads people to calculate whether Australia has received 'value for money' for its investments. But it doesn't have much to do with what people actually get out of watching or being part of the Olympics.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Mack Horton vs the People's Republic of China

    • Jeremy Clarke
    • 17 August 2016
    3 Comments

    Horton desired to highlight the need for more stringent application of doping policies but in the process he enabled Chinese nationalists to bolster their inflated national pride, at his and Australia's expense. That he used his concern about drug use as a competitive tactic lessened its effectiveness, and only enabled Chinese nationalists to once more don the mantle of victim. Any chance for reform around issues like drugs in sport got caught in the wake of wounded egos and jingoistic pride.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Corruption and calamity in Rio's Games of exclusion

    • Antonio Castillo
    • 08 August 2016
    4 Comments

    The Rio 2016 Olympics has earned a well-deserved label: the jogos da excludad, the games of exclusion. It is a label that shames a ruling class that got its priorities wrong. In the name of the Games, 77,000 residents of Rio's favelas have been evicted and hundreds of these settlements have been bulldozed. Those favelas that avoided the bulldozers have been hidden behind concrete walls that epitomise what theologian Leonardo Boff has called the 'lack of shame' living deep in the Brazilian soul.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Punk's holy fools still putting it to Putin

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 11 April 2014

    Journalist Masha Gessen describes the members of Pussy Riot as 'Putin's ideal enemies'. In recent months, their nemesis has hosted the Olympics, taken control of Crimea and clamped down on media. For a group born out of 'the repressions of a corporate political system that directs its power against basic human rights', Pussy Riot still has much to roar about, even if its signature 'punk prayer' sounds more than ever like a plea.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Social injustice in international sport

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 25 March 2014
    6 Comments

    The Olympics and World Cup were once seen as a triumph of corporate and athletic enterprise, but today we count the cost. Previous events left countries with decaying venues and huge bills. Government funds line the pockets of corporations but do little for local industry. The Olympics have caused the evictions of more than two million people over the past two decades. It's time to re-think what these events are actually trying to achieve.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Paralympics as a work in progress

    • Michael Mullins
    • 03 September 2012
    5 Comments

    The Paralympics opening ceremony shows how far we've come in reversing the exclusion of disabled athletes. But they encourage physically disabled athletes at the expense of the intellectually disabled. 

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