Hall Mark Event Management - the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games - Case Study Example

Hall Mark Event Management: The 2000 Sydney Olympic Games Introduction Although the Sydney Olympics occurred over a decade ago, the city, and the Olympic event remain etched on the minds of Australians, the organisers, and most importantly, those who attended the games. Notably, the Sydney Olympic event has been the focus of several academic explorations, most especially books, most of them investigating the social, cultural and economic impact that the event had on Sydney, and Australia as a whole. One such book is “The times of our lives: Inside the Sydney Olympics: Australia and the Olympic Games 1994-2002” by Harry Gordon. In the book (Chapter 2), Gordon (2003: 50) documents that the bid to have the Olympics in Sydney began in May 1991, and was not only a costly affair financially with the bid costing $18 million, but was also a time consuming undertaking that involved exhaustive lobbying based on a “terse assessment of Sydney’s strengths and weaknesses” (Gordon, 2003: 51). The final presentation that led to Sydney’s win to hold the 2000 summer Olympic Games specifically sought to portray the city as “a friendly city where it doesn’t matter where you come from” (Gordon, 2003: 55). After a tight contest with Beijing (which was also bidding to hold the same event), Sydney won with 45 votes over Beijing’s 43 votes (Gordon, 2003, p. 55). To win the bid, and deliver the games successfully, Sydney had to undertake several initiatives. Repackaging Sydney The Olympic Games has been branded as one of the greatest sporting events, whose social, economic, and cultural effects are felt by the host country for years to come (OECD, 2010: 18). With such knowledge in mind, most governments brand and repackage the host cities through imaging and reimaging, and by so doing, turns the cities in to commodities. As Tyler, Guerrier and Robertson (1998:233, cited by Henderson, 2000: 37) note, the cities are turned in to “a product competing with other products in the marketplace... a place to be consumed”. Ward (1998: 1, cited by Henderson, 2000: 37) further observes that when repackaging a destination through event management, the event planners usually selectively pick, appropriate and repackage social and cultural meanings in the subject city, playing down any problems therein, and creating an attractive place for visitors. Repackaging Sydney was a joint effort between dedicated event organisers, policymakers and the government in general (Gordon, 2003: 80). In addition to constructing stadiums that would host the Olympic Games, there were also other urban development initiatives that the government took up in order to enhance the city’s image on the national, regional, and most importantly, on the international level. Among the works that took place in order to repackage Sydney included building new stadiums, renovating existing stadiums, the construction of a new suburb, and the transformation of Sydney’s city centre. Most specifically, Bermingham (2000:307) notes that existing sports facilities in Sydney were renovated, new bus shelters were built, and recreation facilities remodelled. In addition, there were government initiatives that moved the urban poor and homeless away from the city during the games duration. Repackaging Sydney would have been incomplete without the active participation of the media. Although the event organising team dedicated a substantial budget to advertising and marketing the event, Bermingham (2000: 308) also notes that the media served a pivotal role before, during and after the event in creating positive publicity for the city. As Bermingham (2000: 308) notes, media coverage started right when Sydney won the bid in 1993, and in part inspired by the promise of a ‘green Olympics’. Reinforcing Sydney’s position as a major world city Before hosting the 2000 Olympic Games, Sydney had invested heavily in “successful development planning and delivery” of infrastructure and social services as indicated by OECD (2010: 59). The event managers or organisers specifically used the event to reinforce the city’s position in the global arena by designing the games in a manner that would “deliver an effective economic legacy which could catapult the city towards international competitiveness and success” (OECD, 2010: 59). Notably, and as OECD (2010: 60) observes, the Olympic Games reinforced Sydney’s “strong development progress”. Additionally, the City’s potential to deliver a mega event such as the Olympic Games without major hitches was exposed to a global audience, and this not only marketed the expertise of the organising team, but also projected its other advantages to the global audience. Some of the industries that have benefited immensely from the reinforcement of Sydney as a developed city are the tourism sector, the finance sector, the creative and performing arts sector and the information, media and technology sector (OECD, 2010, p. 60). Among the most cited reasons why Sydney’s position as a mega city has been reinforced following the Olympics was “reputational enhancement of the businesses involved in its delivery” (OECD, 2010: 61). The quality with which the event managers (both from the business and private sectors) delivered the event put Sydney in the global business map. Specifically, OECD (2010) notes that Sydney today acts as a hub for a significant number of multinational corporations in the region, and has even become a “positive model of openness with half of all international visitors and two-thirds of international business visitors to Australia spending time in the city” (OECD, 2010: 61). Again, the role of the media (either through paid advertisements, or free coverage) cannot be understated. With the event broadcasted to a global audience of approximately 3.7 billion viewers, PricewaterhouseCoopers (Cited by OECD, 2010: 61) claimed that the event generated the equivalent of AUD 6.1 billion in Sydney’s business exposure alone. The successful games further boosted Sydney’s brand as a viable tourist and business destination, and according to OECD (2010: 61), the Sydney Brand was the second “most powerful in the world” by 2009. Some of reinforcing strategies that the city adopted include the construction of a new estate to host athletes during the event, and the upgrading and expansion of the Sydney Airport (OECD, 2010: 62). Notably, the event organisers had taken into detail every aspect of the mega event and prepared fully for it, and for that the Olympics helped the city to attain the status of an Alpha+ city, and is hence ranked in the same category as Beijing, Tokyo and Shanghai (OCED, 2010: 59). Reimaging Sydney To comfortably handle an event of the Olympics magnitude, Sydney no doubt needed to engage different reimaging strategies that would not only create room for new developments, such as the Olympic stadium, but also modify existing built in environments by redeveloping redundant or under utilised sites. According to Amin and Thrift (2001: 1), people often think of specific moments or sites when imagining a city. For example, people often think of the Manhattan when imagining New York; the noisy traffic when thinking about Calcutta; or the cafe life when thinking about Paris. Reimagining Sydney therefore, posed a challenge to the Olympic organising committee since they were required to overturn any conception that people, and especially the international community may have had about the city. One of the desirable images that Sydney wanted to create was that of a green city. As Bermingham (2000: 313), recycling was adopted as a ‘green’ way of waste management, while other green lifestyles were used in the construction phases, water management and energy uses in the Olympic events. The Homebush Bay where the Olympic village was constructed was itself a naval armament depot that had been a dumping ground for industrial waste and part of the land was “contaminated with a toxic mixture of chemical compounds” (Bermingham, 2000: 313). To clean up the waste, Australia developed a technology that eliminated the toxic threat forever (Bermingham, 2000: 315). In addition to the green agenda, the event organisers may have considered how infrastructural development initiated to serve the Olympic Games would fit into Sydney’s economic, social and cultural agenda in future. As Amin and Thrift (2003:3) argue, cities are porous, especially because they are “spatially open and cross-cut by many different kinds of nobilities, from flows of people to commodities and information... a recognition that urban life is the irreducible product of mixture”. Notably, Sydney has evolved fairly well into the post-Olympic environment and has even managed to convert the estate constructed as accommodation for athletes into a housing estate for its city dwellers. The Olympic park has also been “developed into a wonderful asset to the people of New South Wales and Australia, offering more that 425 hectares of picturesque parklands, state-of-the-art infrastructure and world-class sporting facilities” (OECD, 2010, p. 62). It is also noteworthy that the Olympic park acts as a major attraction to business and leisure tourists due to its campus-like environment and high quality amenities. Whether such developments were initially reimagined by the Olympic organising committee or whether they have developed spontaneously as people deliberated on how best to use the Olympic park is something that an observer may not very well know. It is however obvious that Sydney’s image has been altered by the 2000 Olympic Games event, and the effects of the games may continue being felt well into the future. References Amin, A & Thrift, N 2002, Cities: Reimagining the urban, Polity Press, Cambridge, MA. Bermingham, S 2000, Changing environment, Heinemann, London. Gordon, H 2003, The tines of our lives: Inside the Sydney Olympics: Australia and the Olympic Games 1994-2002, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland. Henderson, J 2000, ‘Selling places: The new Asia-Singapore brand’, The Journal of Tourism Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 36-44. OECD 2010, ‘Local development benefits from staging global events: achieving the local development legacy from 2012’, A Peer Review of the Olympic and Paralympics’ legacy for East London, Department of Communities & Local Government, UK, pp. 1-88. Read More