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Keywords: Olympics

  • AUSTRALIA

    'I will stand with you'

    • Barry Gittins
    • 30 October 2024

    In 1968, Peter Norman won Olympic silver, but his lasting legacy was a stance for justice on the podium alongside Tommie Smith and John Carlos, where he wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge in solidarity. Yet his quiet protest led to lifelong exclusion at home, recognition arriving only posthumously.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Olympic ceremonies as liturgies

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 07 August 2024

    You have to admit, the French have form for mocking religion. But with their peculiar take on the Lord's Supper with all its Dionysian excess, the colourfully irreverent opening ceremony left many asking: has Paris 2024 turned the Olympics into a ritual of performative ethics? 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Costly pageantry: The Olympics and the blank cheque syndrome

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 05 August 2024

    The pain cities endure while hosting large sporting events like the Olympics has proved considerable. They exert a remarkable strain on budgets, disrupt commerce, compromise valuable real estate, inflict environmental harm, and often result in evictions and displacements of vulnerable residents. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Sports but make it art

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 05 August 2024

    Imagine a universe where the arts, rather than sport, gets all the money and attention from the masses. But we'd be mistaken if we it tried to set up art and sport as opposite rather than complementary pursuits.

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  • 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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