The many challenges of the Beijing Olympics

216

The Games and the Future

The Beijing Olympic Games will prove an interesting watershed in international sport and more particularly in the Olympic Movement.

The IOC continues to place heavy emphasis on attracting major sponsors, accessing more financial resources while, tongue-in-cheek, advocating the retention of the Olympic values. In the process however, it is proving increasingly difficult to find the main ideas and ideals of the founding fathers present in the operational ethos of the Games and even the IOC itself as currently constituted.

For the Olympic Movement of the future there may well be a strong sense of security in so far as the local Chinese sponsors may be considering getting into the perennial sponsorship in the future.

The introduction of the Olympic Youth Summer Games in 2010 and the winter version in 2012 may well see no shortage of sponsorship thereby guaranteeing long term security of these events of the Olympic Movement and the youth of the world of sport.

In the midst of it all however the matter of the location and impact of positive values on the world's youths seem ever more confronted by the threat of condemnation to the fossils of a bygone era never to be recaptured.