Welcome

Emmanuelle Tulle

Chair of the Local Organising Committee

2012 is the year of the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, to be hosted in London. Glasgow itself will also host a large sporting event in 2014, the Commonwealth Games. A lot of hope is riding on these high profile events. The athletes and all who are associated with them professionally and emotionally will of course hope for medals and Personal Bests. Sponsors, promoters and politicians who have invested so much of their reputational and ideological capital in bidding for these events to be hosted in their local communities have a financial stake in the athletes’ success and will want to make these games work.

The ubiquity of sport is demonstrated in the enormous sums invested, the degree of its incorporation into culture, the scope of its infiltration into the legitimate business of governments and the everyday management of our bodies. This ubiquity is also a response to dramatic changes to the broader social landscape within which sport operates. The old ideological battle lines (East vs. West, Communism vs. Capitalism) which heavily influenced the understanding of the local, national and global parameters of sport, have now given way to debates and preoccupations about sport’s place in advancing or resisting cultural, economic and political globalisation. Today’s ideological message is that sport has gone global and is everybody’s business, whether they really care about sport or not. Indeed, the political remit for staging large sporting events, so pronounced in the Cold War era, now unfolds within broader social, cultural and economic ideas about how sport will benefit society, bring added value through regeneration, assist social inclusion, embrace cultural renewal, improve health outcomes and reduce if not eliminate discrimination. 

Is sport always a force for good? Do mega-sporting events bring lasting economic gains for the regions and communities who stage these events? Does sport really lead to regeneration? What role does sport play in social inequalities, the transformation of lives, minds and bodies? In other words, does it challenge and help re-draw boundaries of class, gender, age, race and ethnicity, bodily ability, geography and ultimately of power?  What are the barriers to these outcomes being achieved?

Our ultimate endeavour is to find ways to make sport matter in ways which bring about significant social, cultural and economic change.

I look forward to welcoming you to Glasgow

Yours sincerely,

Emmanuelle Tulle

Chair of the Local Organising Committee