Sydney 2000 may not have seen a sustained increase in sport participation. But the Olympics did leave a mark on Australia.
- Emeritus Professor of Cultural Research, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University
From Peter O'Connor waving the Irish flag in 1906 to rainbow colours at Sochi, athletes have always used the Olympics to share their politics.
The music alone, despite its unquestionable majesty, cannot entirely explain the enduring appeal of a band that existed for barely two years before its lead singer took his own life.
Williamson’s sacking over a tweet reveals not only problems with social media policies and freedom of speech, but the pervasive masculinity of sporting organisations.
The loss of creative spaces to development is pricing Sydney artists out of the city. But they could be encouraged back with new cultural policies.
Scandal-plagued FIFA says it’s committed to reform. Changing the way World Cup hosts are selected would be a start.
Scenes of sand, sea and skyscrapers will add a glitzy veneer to an Old Empire at play.
In these Olympics more than most, there is less global attention on the medal count than on who will win the politics.
North Korea sending a delegation to this year’s Winter Olympics in South Korea may be a global shadow puppet show – or it might help thaw the frozen relations between the two countries.
The New South Wales government has come in for heavy criticism over its $2 billion plan to knock down and rebuild two of Sydney’s largest sports stadiums.
The proposed anti-siphoning changes certainly shift the economic balance from free-to-air to pay-TV, as well as from government intervention in the sport TV market to more open market play.
It is gambling, especially online and mobile, that has come into focus as sport’s most potentially damaging byproduct.
Investing in staging sport is ultimately a matter of turning the entire host environment into a stage.
Foxtel’s high-priced oligopolistic control over Australian pay TV has again clashed with the demands of sport fans and the increasingly sophisticated capture and relay technologies available to them.
There is much work to do if Australia is to eradicate various barriers to participation in sport.
Muhammad Ali was much bigger than boxing. He came, from the late 1960s onwards, to symbolise resistance to racism, militarism and inequality.
As Chris Gayle has so amply demonstrated, there is still considerable resistance to the full integration of women into sport culture – and not least in the sports media.
Despite Australia squandering $43 million on a failed bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the Lowy football dynasty lives on.
Which team you support in sport can depend on many things. But who should you barrack for in this packed weekend of sport if none of your favoured teams are in any of the games?
If a misogynistic atmosphere is allowed to prevail in men’s individual and team sports, then all the platitudes about sport being a socially positive force stand exposed.
Cricket, which has aspirations to become a global game despite the limitations of its growth trajectory along the lines plotted by the old British Empire, may shrink back to a few strongholds.
Richie Benaud was a key figure in cricket’s transformation into an entertainment business. A reading of his life is a tale of the changing relationships between sport, media, business and society.
The cricket World Cup’s opening game, which pits Australia against England on Valentine’s Day, is the latest twist in a summer in which Australia has played host to two of the world’s biggest sporting…
The Melbourne Theatre Company’s (MTC) production of David Williamson’s 2013 play Rupert has finally made it to Sydney, via Melbourne and Washington, in late 2014. Along the way, the MTC has acquired the…
The first cricket Test match of the Australia summer is usually a happy occasion. Its retro sights of white-flannelled figures and the comforting sound of bat on ball herald the holiday season even for…
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