FiT Publishing

Roughly seven years before an Olympic Games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) accepts bids from countries to host an Olympics. Subsequently, the IOC deter-mines and announces to the world who has won (and lost) the right to host. Contrary to prior evidence, we find the announcements do not affect the bidding countries’ stock markets. We complement prior studies by including additional, more recent, years of announcements, by investigating whether there are effects prior to the announcement, and by testing for an effect both parametrically and nonparametrically.

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This paper examines whether increasing the frequency of testing deters athletes from doping. Since data is not available to analyze this problem directly, an indirect approach is required. We use the relationship between testing and Olympic performance to infer the relationship between testing and doping. This requires a variety of assumptions, the most important of which is that doping improves Olympic performance. The results suggest that in some sports, such as track & field (athletics) and wrestling, carrying out more tests does deter athletes from taking drugs. In other sports in...Read more

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) sent shock waves through the Olympic advertising and sponsorship community when it announced in February 2015 that it was relaxing Rule 40 of the Olympic Charter to allow generic (non-Olympic themed) advertising featuring athletes during the Rio 2016 Games (Mackay, 2015). According to the IOC, the purpose of the Rule is to preserve the unique nature of the Games by preventing over-commercialization and to keep the focus on the athletes’ performance (International Olympic Committee, n.d.). Notably, while the IOC does not expressly reference ambush...Read more

Using event study methodology, this paper analyzes the capital market behavior related to shares of companies that sponsored the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games. We investigate the existence of abnormal returns and changes in trading volumes on announcement dates for companies at two sponsorship levels—Official Olympic Partners and Official Olympic Supporters. We also test for differential responses between British and non-British firms. We find that London 2012 Olympic sponsorships are associated with statistically significant increased share values for Official Partners as well as for...Read more

This paper analyzes the impact of the NHL’s participation in the Winter Olympics on competitive balance outcomes within the NHL. It finds that the post-Olympic performance of NHL teams is negatively related to the number of players that the team supplied to the various Olympic rosters. This is consistent with a notion that participating in the Olympics can induce greater fatigue in players, thereby reducing their effectiveness upon their return to their domestic clubs. This effect was found to be particularly strong for players representing the host country at the Olympics.Read more

China spent far more on the 2008 Olympiad than any previous host country. A retrospective assessment of the benefits of the 2008 Games to the Chinese economy will not be possible for several years. We use an adaptation of event study methodology that has been employed by studies of previous Olympiads to analyze the expected benefits of the 2008 Games. We show that the announcement that Beijing would host the 2008 Games led to a brief rise in the Shanghai exchange, but the euphoria quickly dissipated. We find that there was no corresponding decline in the stock exchanges of Beijing’s...Read more

The Olympic Games is the world’s largest and most complex sporting event to host and manage. Such an endeavor is linked with significant public expenditure, the building of facilities and infrastructure, urban rejuvenation, and revival objectives, which can have favorable or unfavorable lasting consequences for public stakeholders (Horne, 2007). Public stakeholders (e.g., residents, local business owners, and tourists) are some of the numerous stakeholders involved with the Olympic Games. Other stakeholders include the federal, state, or provincial governments, sport and tourism...Read more

Synchro Canada is the non-profit national governing body for synchronized swimming in Canada. It is one of 54 national sport organizations (NSO) supported by Sport Canada, the federal government agency responsible for amateur sport in Canada, and one of 39 NSOs that compete at the Olympic level. At the time of the study, Synchro Canada was run by a professional staff of nine individuals located in the national office in Gloucester, Ontario, and the National Coach and Team Manager located at the National High Performance Training Centre in Etobicoke, Ontario. The organization was guided by...Read more

The spectator audience for the Olympic Winter Games has been increasing around the world. This phenomenon is highlighted in countries such as Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa (termed “non-traditional” markets) that rarely participate in the Winter Games, yet choose to watch them. To explore this phenomenon we interviewed key figures involved with the Olympic Movement. Our intention was to identify key themes from the text of the interviews and put these themes together to form a framework that would explain the growing interest in the Olympic Winter Games. The results showed that the...Read more

Given the increasing dependence of sport organizations and events on corporate sponsorship, this study set out to examine the motivations of the Grand National sponsors of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games and the objectives they sought to fulfill through their sponsorship. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven of the ten Grand National Olympic sponsors. Findings indicated that these companies?decision to join the National Sponsoring Program was not entirely business-driven; rather, the desire to support the national effort and a sense of obligation led most companies to enter...Read more