Abstract

Legacy has been conventionally divided in two: ‘hard’ or ‘soft’, ‘tangible’ or ‘intangible’. The terms ‘hard’ and ‘tangible’ are more or less interchangeable and their binary opposites ‘soft’ and ‘intangible’ have tended to be treated in the same way. Hard legacy is the more obvious and easily understood of the two, although its different manifestations are varied, complex and interconnected. The most obvious type of hard legacy is the stadium and attendant sporting facilities and buildings for athletes, including training facilities and accommodation. This differs, with the Olympic Games requiring multiple sporting venues and a special ‘Olympic Village’, whereas for the World Cup national teams use multiple stadia of similar design and stay in private hotels. Stadia play a major part in this study, from Mussolini’s Rome to Croke Park in Dublin or the Olympic stadia in Stockholm and Helsinki. This kind of material legacy, however, is not confined to sport itself and is increasingly part of a much broader project of urban development or regeneration. It is not enough to provide the facilities for the athletes and spectators; mega sporting events are almost always both national and international. Hence the holding of a mega event offers the potential for reshaping a whole area of a city and the wider region surrounding it, as Richard Cashman shows in his analysis of the ‘precincts’ of the Sydney Olympic stadium. [...] Cashman deals with a key issue: can holding the Olympics successfully regenerate the part of the city around the main stadium? The first stated aim of legacy for Sydney 2000 was ‘to integrate the park into the city’, attracting both inward investment from business and residential development. In other words, the legacy of the sporting event would not be sport primarily – the future use of the Olympic facilities – but suburban regeneration. This, he argues, is a long-term process running through to 2030 and it is only in this kind of time frame that legacy can be fully evaluated. Aus der Einleitung des Sammelbandes