Impact Of The Term "Legacy" On Mega Events

To fully examine the discrepancies between bid promises and legacy delivery, the term legacy must be adequately defined. According to Hiller, the legacy of the Games amounts to the “post-event consequences” of sports mega-events, and Leopkey and parent call it a peoxy for “return on investment”. This “return on investment” is characterized differently by the two central organizations involved in planning any mega-event: the OC, which focuses on hosting the event itself, and therefore on the short-term offset of money spent, and the host country government, where the investment is larger and focused on the long-term use of anything created for the event, or what the government ‘gets’ out of the effort. While the concept of legacy is thus acknowledged as a central requirement for games bids, the question remains as to what is actually meant by legacy.

The concept of legacy has been popularized to the point that it retains little semantic significance, which is reflected in the preparation of bids. Bid documents often lack specificity about the details of the legacy benefits, framing them in ways that are vague and encompassing without clear strategies to achieve the proposed benefits. This may be because there is an enticing vagueness, or ambiguity, in the term legacy that leds itself to broader agreement. When outcomes are agreed, the theoretical reasons for the agreement may not need to be aligned.

Thus, it serves all parties to agree on a broad legacy even where ideas on what actually constitutes the legacy and how it can be established may differ. Another example of the benefit of ambiguity in mega-event planning comes from Burton who suggests that there is not only ambiguity in benefits, but in costs as well. He asserts that this ambiguity of costs may be the sole way that some Olympic cities are able to host the Games at all. Burton claims that with greater transparency over actual costs and benefits, the Games would likely prove to be uneconomic, or at least unpalatable to taxpayers as a suitable return on investment.

Finally, there are issues with the use of the term legacy as a solely positive and all-encompassing phenomenon. While the literature has used the term legacy to address both positive and negative impacts of mega-events, mega-event bids often adopt a heavily eulogistic approach in the discussion of legacy, focusing on broad statements of positive outcomes. While the International Olympic Committee (IOC's) Evaluation Commission is intended to provide an independent evaluation of the bid, their role is focused on evaluating what is documented, while giving a brief summary of anything that is evidently missing, rather than highlighting potential negative outcomes of the events. The term legacy in mega-events has thus become synonymous with the term benefits, while negative ‘legacies’ are defined by a plethora of different terms, such as ‘white elephants’, or ‘displacements’ that are not easily recalled for comparison. Some might suggest that this is because the bid document is a sales document; however, given that it becomes a legally binding agreement when the Host City Contract is signed, it could equally be argued that the downside risk should be openly assessed in its contents.