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Political dissent threads through the history of the Olympic Games. Although the International Olympic Committee (IOC) openly prohibits athletes from injecting politics into the Games, Olympians have nevertheless staged protests, using the Olympics to challenge the predominant power structures and institutions. This chapter analyzes outbursts of athlete activism in the context of wider social movements that make these political paroxysms more viable. Social movements scythe political space for athletes, spark athletes' political imaginary, and provide support and cover. From the early days of the Games, Olympic athletes have expressed dissent, as when Irish track-and-field athlete Peter O'Connor rebelled against British colonialism at the 1906 Olympics in Athens. At the Mexico City 1968 Games, Czech gymnast Vera Čáslavská carried out a politically symbolic acts as did US sprinters John Carlos, Tommie Smith, and Wyomia Tyus. At the 1972 Munich Games, US track medalists Vincent Matthews and Wayne Collett protested in nonchalant fashion on the medal stand. At the 1980 Olympics, Polish Olympian Władysław Kozakiewicz issued politically provocative symbology on the pole vault mat that challenged Soviet hegemony. In the twenty-first century, numerous Olympians have made political statements, despite a rule in the Olympic Charter that forbids such activity. In each case, athlete activists were bolstered by vibrant political movements in their home country. In this chapter, I trace the relationship between political Olympians and social movements as well as the wider dialectic of resistance and restriction that encompasses the interplay between dissident Olympians and the IOC.

While the Olympic Games are always under the spotlight, the Paralympic Games are somehow ignored. This paper aims to invite the general public to think about the para-athletes and the differential treatments they received.

Among the participating countries, many of them were unable to win a single Olympic or Paralympic medal. When the dependent variable is left-censored, ordinary least squares regression is asymptotically biased downwards. In the literature, researchers typically employ the maximum likelihood Tobit model to take care of the censoring problem. However, some researchers argue that the Hurdle model has an advantage over the Tobit model in identifying the determinants of winning Olympic medals. Following their wisdom, this paper employs both the Tobit and Hurdle models in analysis.

The empirical evidence gathered in this paper suggests that population size, host status and average years of schooling are the big three socio-economic determinants when it comes to winning medals at the Paralympic Games and Olympic Games. The findings support the hypothesis that sports talent is randomly distributed and a large country has a higher chance to have talented athletes or para-athletes winning the Olympic medals. The strong host advantage also showed up in the following Paralympics but was not so strong at the next Olympics.

This paper not only examines the relationship between various social, economic and political factors in determining the success of a nation in the Paralympic Games but also attempts to identify possible non-traditional determinants.

Competitions in high-performance sports are based on the premise of fairness and the absence of advantages for participants. Therefore, several metrics were created to divide participants into categories and neutralize the advantages of some athletes. The division by sex is justified in the face of differences in body development between men and women due to testosterone levels. Faced with the difficulties of determining a single unequivocal criterion for determining sex, major sports entities periodically change the rules that guide the inclusion criteria to compete in the female category. The purpose of this study is to assess whether changes in gender metric rules bring female sports performance closer to male performance, reducing the equality of conditions for female competitors.

This is a retrospective study that compared female and male results from the past 5 Olympic games in the 100-metre dash, high jump and javelin throw.

The performance in the men's category in the 100-metre dash was superior to the women's in the Olympic Games in Sydney by 8.78% (± 0.16), in Athens by 9.88% (± 0.21), in Beijing by 10.11% (± 0.29), in London by 9.25% (± 0.59) and in Rio de Janeiro by 8.6% (± 0.23). The male high jump was higher than the female by 17.24% (± 1.18) in Sydney, 16.61% (± 1.83) in Athens, 17.01% (± 1.79) in Beijing, 15.47% (± 1.96 higher) in London and 19.67% (± 1.09) in Rio de Janeiro. In the javelin throw, the male superiority was 34.87% (± 2.35) in Sydney, 29.88% (± 4.15) in Athens, 31.87% (± 4.15) in Beijing, 29.44% (± 3.24) in London and 32.31% (± 2.69) in Rio de Janeiro.

As limitations of the study, this study mentions the lack of hormonal dosage of the athletes involved, the non-evaluation of other modalities with different dynamics of execution and muscular requirements and the non-evaluation of the rules in sexual metrics during the qualifying stages for the games.

In this manuscript, the authors show that interference of the International Olympic Committee in the sex metric influences the athletic performance of women in some sports. Rules that facilitate participation of transgender athletes, or with sexual differentiation disorder and other forms of hyperandrogenism, improve female athletic performance overall.

The authors believe that this manuscript is appropriate for publication by International Journal of Human Rights in Healthcare because it is an original paper that fits the goals of the publication. This manuscript creates a paradigm for future policies that rule the sex determination metrics in competitive sports.

In 2020, Sports Illustrated proclaimed its “Sportsperson of the Year” as something dubbed “the activist athlete,” choosing five athletes – LeBron James, Breanna Stewart, Patrick Mahomes, Naomi Osaka, and Laurent Duvernay-Tardif – that represented the term. Like so many athletes who came before them, these athletes vividly demonstrate the potential of sport to shine a spotlight on critical issues in society, yet again solidifying how sport does not exist merely as some kind of escape, but is a major stakeholder in global campaigns for social justice.

This chapter historicizes the contemporary resurgence of athlete activism, largely connected to the reawakening of Black Lives Matters (BLM) in 2020, within what journalist Howard Bryant has called The Heritage, with athletes who acknowledge and accept the charge to use their spotlights for those who have none. From the turning point of the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, which saw collective movements of African-American athletes culminate in the powerful Black power protest by Tommie Smith and John Carlos, a protest that built upon the legacies of so many, to the ongoing debates that surround the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) Rule 50, athletes have long understood how sport serves not only as an integral part of society but also as an agent for change. Contemporary cries for athletes to “shut up and dribble” echo past claims that sport takes place on a level playing field that transcends politics. The history of sports demonstrates otherwise, as athletes embody every imaginable, intersectional, classification of political actor.

This research aims to focus on the strategic management by National Olympic Committees (NOCs) during the COVID-19 crisis. The authors investigate “How are strategies being developed within European NOCs to tackle the impact of the corona crisis?” and “which measures have proven to be particularly helpful?”

The research uses a sequential exploratory mixed-methods approach. Five high-level representatives of European NOCs were interviewed using expert interviews to gain insights into their strategy development process. The interviews were analyzed using qualitative content analysis, and a questionnaire was developed based on the results. Nineteen other European NOCs were surveyed using this questionnaire to verify the strategy development process steps on a larger sample.

The research resulted in a six-step NOC strategy development process framework, with helpful measures for each step. It can help the organizations to better cope with current or upcoming crises.

This framework can serve as a guide for NOCs to find the right steps and measures to better perform in crisis situations.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to consolidate knowledge and benchmark the progress being made across the 32 International Federations (IFs) in the Summer Olympic Programme.

Design/methodology/approach: A website content analysis, analytical hierarchy of information, and social media research was conducted to triangulate the barriers and drivers of environmental sustainability (ES) progress. This data was then analysed to empirically substantiate the findings of previous methods by exploring potential drivers of IF ES progress and communication and refining the ranking of IF ES progress.

Results and findings: World Sailing is by far the most advanced IF in terms of ES progress, followed by World Athletics. Only 4 out of 32 have any sort of strategic ES plans. Only golf, surfing, football, sailing, and hockey have received any academic attention. There is a significant lack of understanding of environmental practices across sport, and their drivers/barriers. There is limited accountability with regards to ES progress and activities throughout the Olympic Movement. This has resulted in uneven diffusion of environmental activities.

Originality: This paper is a new contribution to sport management and ES literature. It provides a benchmark of understanding for ES in the Summer Olympic Programme for the first time using a hierarchy of information to ground results. The exploration and comparison of the perspectives of separate sports adds to the paper's originality.

Mothers play important roles in their families' lives. When they are high performance athletes, they need specific supports that will enable them to excel in their roles as mother athletes. The feminist qualitative research in this chapter is based on data from two studies drawn from semi-structured interviews with elite female distance runners: 14 in 2013–2014 and 11 in 2021. We address two questions: (1) what are the considerations that elite female distance runners make around planning their pregnancy(ies) and family lives? and (2) how have experiences shifted between athlete interviews in 2013–2014 and a new cohort of athletes in 2021? In order to address these questions, we drew on three complementary theoretical approaches: liberal feminism, radical feminism, and strategic essentialism. Further, we then used thematic analysis and generated three broader themes about elite female distance runners that aligned with both cohorts of athletes. First, athletes are forced to plan/strategize their pregnancies around finances, competitions, contracts, and spousal supports due to the lack of support from athletic governing bodies or corporate sponsors. Second, female athletes who choose to have children experience stress and uncertainty in their athletic careers that their male counterparts do not. Third, elite female athletes are demanding that further change occur to address these inequalities, and participants offered a number of potential solutions to improve supports for these athletes. Although solid progress has been noted in the timeframes of our two cohorts, further commitment from athletic governing bodies and corporate sponsors is needed to work toward gender equity in athletics.

The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between the attributes of Olympic mascots and their impact on sponsorship effectiveness. Based on a multiattribute model and the introduction of engagement theory and the meaning transfer model, this article uses the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics mascot “Bing Dwen Dwen” as the research object to empirically analyze the effects and mechanisms of the mascot's attributes on preference, event engagement, sponsorship enterprise trust and sponsorship enterprise attitude, ultimately constructing a sponsorship effectiveness model.

The survey method was used to examine 238 respondents' emotions and attitudes towards companies participating in sponsoring Olympic mascots.

The study found that the main attributes of the mascot include visual and emotional factors, both of which have a positive impact on preference, with emotional factors having a greater influence than visual factors. Visual and emotional factors indirectly affect engagement through preference. Preference and engagement play a completely mediating role in the effect of mascot attributes on sponsorship enterprise trust and sponsorship enterprise attitude.

This study provides practical recommendations for managers to achieve marketing success in sports sponsorship through mascots.

This paper provides a measurement tool for the study of mascot attributes and important support for subsequent research in sponsorship marketing.