Abstract des Autors

Much has been written about the legacies of Olympic Games but there have been little efforts to synthesize current knowledge. This has led to inconsistencies in defining, contextualising and measuring these legacies. The literature review described in this paper provides an overview over research on the legacy of the Olympic Games from 1908 to 2016 that was published in peer-reviewed journals between 1984 and 2017. The analysis reveals a significant increase of literature dealing with Olympic legacy since 2008. It turns out that considerably more studies relate to the legacy of Summer Olympic Games than of Winter Games. Regarding the six different facets of legacy of the framework that was employed, ‘urban development’ and ‘beliefs and behaviour’ have been scrutinized much more often than the other four. Regarding the methodologies used in legacy studies there is a dominance of commentary articles and a lack of adequate empirical research. This leads to a number of implications for future studies, which are discussed in the paper.