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This paper presents an overview of the lessons learned by successful and unsuccessful small businesses during the 1996 Summer Olympic games in Atlanta, Georgia, and considers their impact on organisations involved in the 2000 Olympiad in Sydney, Australia. With the Olympics in Australia now imminent, it appears that whilst the organisers have learnt and benefited from the painful lessons of Atlanta, there are still issues that are causing much concern even at this late stage of event organisation.

In this article the development of the Olympic Games (the biggest mega sport event ever) will be described as an interesting case in the sport‐tourism relationship. The Olympics are indeed the biggest show on earth … the most participants in history, … spectators on site and the greatest television audience ever. This marriage of convenience between sport and tourism will be explored and examplified, first in general and second by means of on historical overview (of the Summer and Winter Games) and the economic impact of the Olympic Games.

This paper investigates the challenge of ticketing for the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG). During the various phases of ticket marketing and ticket offers, mistakes were committed, which caused damage to the ticketing campaign and the image of the Organizing Committee as well. The public disappointment produced by those mistakes was expressed in many different ways. One month prior to the Opening Ceremony, more than two million tickets remained unsold. However, people’s desire to take part in the “greatest show on earth”, led to a boom in tickets sales in the lead up to the Opening Ceremony. Finally, SOCOG managed to sell 87.90 per cent of the tickets available to the public, the largest percentage of tickets ever sold in an Olympiad.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons that mega‐events rarely realise their potential for host destinations and to suggest issues that need to be addressed in rectifying this issue.

The paper is based on a synthesis of the literature as well as the substantial event‐related experience of the authors.

The key reason that mega‐events do not generate the expected benefits for the host destination is that event organisers and destination managers adopt a short‐term perspective rather than seeing mega‐events as part of a long‐term strategy for the destination. Even the planned legacies are often not realised as resource constraints in the lead up to the staging of the event often results in resources being shifted away from planning for legacies and being allocated to helping cover the more immediate needs of the event.

If the mega‐event knowledge portal that is proposed in this paper to help improve the overall contribution that mega‐events make to host destinations is developed, it will prove to be a fertile source of data for longitudinal research in the field of mega‐events.

As so many mega‐events fail to deliver the expected benefits for the host destination, this paper provides some useful insights into the key issues that need to be addressed in order to help overcome this problem.

The bid process for hosting mega global sporting events mandates the enactment of event-specific ambush marketing legislation that provides extraordinary trademark law protections for private sports organisations and their official sponsors. Such event-specific ambush marketing legislation, or ESAML, has come under increasing scrutiny by academics and practitioners who question, among other things, the need for such legislation. One of the major areas of concern has become the potential social cost of such legislation that includes restrictions on free speech and curbs on marketplace competition. We apply economic theory as a means to explain why governments have been so willing to enact such legislation.

The purpose of this paper is to encourage scholarly inquiries to critically examine broad perspectives of marketing and business operations in the sport industry of growing economies.

A comprehensive review of literature was the primary research method to introduce the following critical questions, “what are the major challenges in the sport industry of developing economies in a globalized market environment and what to do?”.

Seven articles are selected based on their theoretical and practical contributions.

This special issue is committed to trigger more investigations into sport businesses in developing countries and ultimately advancing theories and seeking solutions.

Using Beijing’s bid for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games as an example, the purpose of this paper is to explore the expected social impact of mega-sporting events, as perceived by non-host city residents, and the way in which this perception affects attitudes toward bidding.

An empirical survey study was conducted in which data were collected from residents in Shanghai, comprising a sample of 483 respondents. An exploratory factor analysis identified 40 items loaded on eight distinctive factors that underlie the expected social impact of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. A multiple regression analysis was conducted to determine the effect of the perceived impact on residents’ attitudes toward the bid to host the Olympics.

Among the eight identified impact factors, six were found to be positive and two negative. While all factors were significantly higher above the point of indifference, perceived positive impact factors tended to outweigh those that were negative. In addition, seven out of the eight factors were found to be significantly predictive of support for Beijing’s bidding: while the effect of “tourism and environment,” “social capital and psychic income,” “international cooperation and exchange,” “infrastructure,” “national image,” and “sport development” was positive, the effect of the “higher living cost” factor was negative with regard to the support of the bidding. This study seeks to contribute by taking a non-host community perspective.

A growing body of literature has documented perspectives on events and their specific timing during event cycles, i.e., during the bidding stage. In addition, it also offers insight into the perception and attitudes of citizens from emerging markets toward event bidding and hosting, both of which play an increasingly important role in global sports but, on the whole, remain relatively under researched.

Purpose – We examine electoral politics in the City of Atlanta, GA, and shed light on the prospect that in 2009 Atlanta elected its “last Black mayor.”  We consider how African American tensions around class and social identity may demobilize key constituents of the Black electoral coalition while an increasing Black out-migration and White in-migration had changed the city’s racial balance of electoral power. Recognizing the margin of victory in the 2009 mayoral election between Kasim Reed (an African American) and Mary Norwood (a White challenger) was small (714 votes), we examine how electoral and demographic characteristics explain this result.Methodology – We utilize (1) the 2009 State of Georgia Board of Elections voter demographic file; (2) 2010 Census data (ACS 5 year estimates), and 2009 Mayoral Election count data. We presented descriptive statistics, comparing community level factors and voter characteristics.Research implications – The limitations of this work is that it is exploratory and thus we do not statistically isolate the effects of class and social identity.Findings – Our findings indicate that Reed and other Black elected officials will have to make concerted efforts if they hope to “retain” the Black poor as well as gay and lesbian citizens within a progressive electoral coalition.

American suburbia changed drastically over the past century. Once home to wealthy white enclaves, suburbs opened to the masses after World War II through federal housing and infrastructure programs. A population shift from the American Rustbelt cities in the North and Midwest to the South and Southwest fueled the growth of new suburbs. The rise since the 1970s of global immigration from Central and South America as well as Asia helped diversify the country with the majority of this population relocating to suburbs rather than central cities. Located 20miles outside Atlanta, GA, Gwinnett County provides an opportunity to examine how these trends have manifested. Using this county as a case study, this chapter describes how Gwinnett has evolved over three periods of growth. From its founding in the 1820s to the 1960s, the area was dominated by small towns and an agricultural-based economy separated by elites and locals. The development of infrastructure led to the New Suburban phase from the 1970s to 1990s. A national migration of rustbelters coupled with regionals from the rural South made Gwinnett an upscale, white, upper middle class Republican area. As Gwinnett became one of the country's fasted growing counties, problems from urban sprawl appeared. In the third phase, Avoiding Slumburbia, Gwinnett wrestles with deteriorating older suburban corridors while adjusting to an influx of international migration. By 2009 Gwinnett became a majority minority county. This chapter looks at Gwinnett as a national example of a rapidly growing suburban area within a quickly expanding metropolitan area that is representative of current American suburbanization trends.