Introduction
In recent times, the prominence of events in attracting the masses has grown, with cities and countries across the world now fighting to host big events. The emerging trend has attracted the interest of researchers who have ventured into the study of events and their impact. Indeed, events feature predominantly in most of today’s literature from top monographs, journals, and school textbooks. The effect of hosting events is broad, covering the political, cultural, environmental, economic, and social aspects.
The contest among cities and countries formulating bids to host mega sporting events is increasing at a high rate. The different regions derive their validation and approval from the local communities by fashioning their message around their benefits after hosting the events. Some of the significant benefits described in the literature include urban developments, cultural exchange, enhanced transport systems, recreational facilities, and national pride. The aim of this paper is to assess the social impacts of hosting mega sporting events. The objective includes discussing the positive and negative social effects of spotlighting Formula One and the Olympics Games.
Mega Events and Hallmark Events
There is no specific definition for events, with different authors proposing varied meanings. However, events are broadly categorized into hallmark events and mega-events based on the masses they can attract, size, and media coverage. Hallmark events are notable one-time or recurring events of a short period, advanced chiefly to enrich a host destination’s awareness, appeal, and productivity (Preuss, 2019). They encompass sporting activities that mark a critical historical appeal. They also pose meaning in terms of traditions, desirability, appearance or publicity, that the event affords the host venue of the society with a competitive advantage.
On the other hand, mega sporting events are strategic events with enormous widespread demand and universal orientation; they are casually asymmetrical, noteworthy, and mainly extra-large. The events have the dimensions to convey publicity messages to billions of the global populace by means of mass commercials through the internet, the press, and televisions that have colossal viewership. They also pull vast numbers of visitors and are, for the most part, linked to developmental roles or image-making for the host area (Gold and Gold, 2017). Mega sporting events are further characterized by their capacity to spawn several notable effects for the host destination across different sectors such as tourism, education, social-cultural, transport and travel, and infrastructure, establishing the base for wide-range changes, both positively and adversely.
Formula One and the Summer Olympics
The Formula One (F1) is a thrilling motorsport with a broad commercial appeal, especially in developed countries. The race also attracts an immense international consumer interest, with the sports’ enthusiast drawn from all corners of the world. The F1 idea emerged in 1894, but the motorsport formally adopted the current set-up as a World Championship series in 1950. The initial series of races were held in seven countries: Britain, Switzerland, Belgium, the U.S.A., France, and Italy. Britain and Italy host the most F1 series events, which jointly host over 123 editions of the race. The Grand Prix event has also spread to other countries, particularly in the Asian continent (Singapore, Russia, Turkey, China, Qatar, Japan, Bahrain), and it is now hosted across 34 countries (Formula One, 2021). Saudi Arabia is the newest country to host the F1, which was hosted on 5 December 2021 in the city of Jeddah.
The Grand Prix F1 events are highly broadcast to reach millions of audiences all over the globe. During the 2020 season, the F1 achieved the highest average viewers per Grand Prix at 87.4 million. For the three prior consecutive years (2016, 2017 and 2018), the average number of viewers per Grand Prix was 87 million (Formula One, 2021). The achievement was exceptional considering the COVID-19 challenges that wrecked the year, resulting in four fewer races. According to the Formula One (2021), a total of 1.5 billion people watched the Grand Prix in 2020 compared to 1.9 billion in 2019. The decline in total viewership is because the F1 had 17 races for the season 2020 compared to 21 races in 2019. The F1 attained the highest viewership for 2020 during the Hungarian Grand Prix that was 103.7 million representing a seven percent increase from the 2019 figure (Formula One, 2021). Portugal, Bahrain, and Turkey reported the following high audiences of 100.5 million, 98.1 million, and 89.1 million, respectively.
Furthermore, F1 has a solid digital presence and was ranked the second-fastest emergent major sports league worldwide across the leading social media platforms in 2020. During the year, it attained over 35 million followers across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, Twitch and Chinese social platforms (Toutiao, WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin). Additionally, 2020 was characterized by over 4.9 billion video views and a total engagement of 810 million, representing a 47 percent and 99 percent increase, respectively. New races boosted the digital presence through the reviewed 2020 schedule and a 20 percent increase in video upload (Formula One, 2021). The overall enthusiasm for the duration of the races also leads to increased traffic and online activity.
In general, F1 at the moment strongly outperforms other key sports in the digital arena, including the Premier League, La Liga, P.G.A. tour and N.B.A. The trends buttress the decision by Liberty Media to pay money for the F1 media rights in 2016 (US$8 billion) (Formula One, 2021). In 2017 the media company generated a total turnover of US$1.8 billion, with the World Cup football tournament and the Olympic Games being the only major competitors. Therefore, the F1 races continue to draw sufficient attention to warrant significant impact for the host destination.
The Olympic Games are the world’s top justly universal, multisport, and triumphant sports events. The games were established in 1896 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin on the philosophy of Olympism. Since then, the games have grown and developed into modern multisport global events. They bring together people who converge to compete and feel inspired. The summer and Winter Olympics are held separately after every four years (Bason and Grix, 2018). The latest Olympics Games, the Summer Olympics, were held in 2020 in Tokyo, Japan and the Winter Olympics were held in 2018 in PyeongChang, South Korea. The games featured over 11,417 athletes from 206 countries, with 404 different events and 2,800 athletes drawn from close to 100 countries, respectively (Gold and Gold, 2017). Only a tiny percentage of the global populace is able to be present at the Games physically. Nonetheless, the Olympic Games attract the most extensive media coverage reaching over 4.5 billion people across the globe. The Summer Olympics attracts the best and top professional athletes from all corners of the world. A few countries steal the show for their legendary sportspeople, such as Jamaica, Kenya, the U.S.A., and Ethiopia.
The Olympics Games’ widespread popularity has attracted increased social media usage as of the 2004 event held in Athens, Greece, that attracted over 4 billion viewers globally. Today, international spectators consume media coverage about the games and aggressively contribute and engage in the events. The use of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram has attracted participation and enabled the co-creation of the games along with conventional media. For the duration of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics, the I.O.C uploaded over 1.6 billion videos pertaining to the games onto the different social media platforms (Bason and Grix, 2018). The wide-ranging appeal of the Olympics Games has the knack to control entire homelands and cultures. The broad media coverage plays a major role in fashioning the authenticity of the Olympic Games for those who are not able to go to the host destination. They have come to be observed as a reassuring means for semi-peripheral people to catch the fancy of a CNN presence.
Social Impact of Events
The extraordinary landscape of mega sporting events is an exclusive means through which the host destination attains far-reaching paybacks. But essentially, not all paybacks are positive; hence, it is imperative to sidestep an over-simplified gratitude of the landscape of social impacts. For the most part, the social impacts are manifest in the form of both positive and negative effects, which can be tangible or intangible that impact the society’s perception of the mega sporting events. The tangible social results are positive community development that are realized, for instance, through the construction of beneficial leisure amenities (Bason and Grix, 2018). The intangible social impacts are acknowledged in the form of soft social exchanges that raise the profile and pride of the host community.
Cities across the world place their bids to host mega sporting events for their ability to draw growth and spawn gains for the masses residing in the host area. According to, a significant feature of mega sporting events is their capability to occupy the host city, bring people together in festivity, attract visitors, develop the destination, and engender business deals. According to Gold and Gold (2017), hosting a mega sporting event boons the opening for intermediations, principally in relation to impacts upon the native community. Individuals who advocate for the experiences hold that intangible social results can sway community attitudes and frame of mind. The gains are experienced across all levels of society regardless of their contribution.
The design of mega sporting events aims to fashion new-fangled practices that are all-encompassing to the different sets of people found in the world. The organizers desire to enable and facilitate the communities to have a feel-good atmosphere of the festival that expands the social interactions. As such, hosting mega sporting events that result in the public feeling a sense of comradeship can help to make inroads concerning reducing harmful practices such as marginalization. For the most part, the outcomes of mega sporting events match experiences people often crave for and/or desire (Bason and Grix, 2018). That’s why well-thought-out mega-events make a key resource influence to addressing social dysfunction surrounded by other social ills, predominantly in alienated groups of people. As such, the upshots of feel-good experiences, a commemorative spirit and civic pride can be painstaking indispensable sources of event value. Usually, a feel-good effect depicts “the sense of contentment…happiness of the people in the host community…and moods of pride or passion induced.” Such descriptions have the capacity to reduce social inequalities and the proliferation of discriminatory and classist deeds through capitalizing on the welfare of the general public.
The stature of the mega sporting events is expected to uplift the legacy of the host country, which they can use to leverage on international relations. Besides, the local community intends to benefit from the infrastructure that will be left for them to use. At present, the International Olympic Committee (I.O.C.) lays great emphasis on the promotion of the sustainability of the event. The I.O.C. promotes this by putting a spotlight on social aspects, such as the social and housing matters, and the groundwork for developing the events. Rocha (2020) states that the new focus is an effort by the governing body to deal with the problems connected to the process of bidding and hosting the Olympic Games. It also seeks to hearten the creation of a sustainability strategy aimed at championing a positive impact. This comes at the backdrop of the latest advent of anti-bid groups, such as the “No Olympics LA” and the “No Boston 2024”, driven by the mounting local discernments of negative impacts. However, social problems still persist of how to involve and cultivate the civic pride in local groups for the mega sporting event. For instance, after the 2012 London Olympic Games, the inhabitants benefited from the innovative sports set-up and better-quality quarters that were non-existent.
The mega-events bring a socializing effect where different stakeholders, including the players, participants, and audiences, are drawn from varying backgrounds. By this means, the events create an environment that is perfect for cross-cultural exchange and integration. The previous hosting of mega sporting events supports this argument has been supported through the impact generated that has enabled cultural progression of the host city or country. Through these events, people who are strangers to each other meet, and by interacting with each other, they harbor the desire to cut cultural ambiguity to boost the prospect of fashioning new interactions. In the midst of many hurdles due to different backgrounds, the participants are faced with an empathy challenge making it hard to cultivate relations and intermingle (Rocha, 2020). The events, however, provide the much-needed empathy across diverse beliefs through which the different cultural interactions between two people shape a third culture, that of mutual importance.
The third culture emerges from the contestants’ input of distinctive beliefs, customs, values, and symbols and their disposition to communicate cooperatively. The interchange supports the formation of mutually supporting importance where different views of beliefs by each side blend into one third mutual culture (Clark et al., 2016). Even as the people of different cultures may not be able to do away with their upbringing, beliefs and history totally, it is conceivable to for two divergent philosophies to create a meaning of the other party’s understanding of the world through “fusion of horizons.” Indeed mega sporting events breed openings to strip away old conducts and pave the way for fresh, all-encompassing conduct, such as togetherness. People can adjust their views based on their sprouting life experiences of an occurrence in the course of this provisional period. Given these benefits, it is possible that elation, heightened national pride, and togetherness are outcomes that the event promoters can leverage to contribute to how the society infers the event’s social value and deepen the quality of life.
The F1 motorsport events enhance urban identity through place marketing that creates unique entertainment events that symbolize a manifest publicity presentation of local cosmopolitanism. The publicity derived from the staging of the F1 events targets the global audience. The host destination ensures that its promotion features prominently in urban place marketing schemes. The hosting of the Grand Prix races is a constitutive piece of place marketing approaches considered and effected by host regions to join the statuses of first-class multicultural cities. F1 motorsport is a representation of a particular conception of urban cosmopolitanism, one that embodies a fusion of sports entertainment, symbolic capital, and image into a single place marketing product (Clark et al., 2016). The article concludes that the bombardment of visual signs advertising elite global mega-brands constructs a specific identity for host cities anchored in a broad discourse of cosmopolitanism. This deployment of graphical indicators is designed to link the image of F1 cities with the desired lifestyle markers that are constitutive features of the aesthetic of contemporary urban cosmopolitanism.
The events provide host countries with the opportunities to publicize their culture, which may help sort out misconceptions about the region from outside people. By hosting the Grand Prix F1 race, Saudi Arabia affords an excellent opportunity for the country to bury negative images regarding their bad treatment towards people from other regions, especially non-Muslims. There have been reports of human rights abuses in the country, the showcasing of the F1 race should aim to disabuse such notions (Mao and Huang, 2016). The government has the opportunity to bring out its strengths and appeal to people with negative interpretations of the country’s culture. China has also been branded a bad country for a long time because the communist party is regarded as exceptionally authoritarian. The government got the opportunity to sidestep this premonition by hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics Games in the city of Beijing. The event afforded China the much-desired opportunity to not only display their culture but also push back the world’s misconceptions regarding the country. China made the most out of the event to show its organization, oneness, and capacity to cooperate with others.
Furthermore, the Olympic Games mirror the global flexibility of people, resources, and information as well as the extension of social relationships into different compasses of life. The local communities intend to benefit from better attitudes toward event hosting. They also derive an incomes that enables them to lead an improved quality of life, which is a relevant indicator for a host community’s affluence. Given that the games embody unique mega sporting events, they also epitomize a promoter for positive social adjustment in the host country and around the globe. They have the force to attract the supply of additional symbols and images that help to pull more investments. The Olympic Games can also be utilized for a good cause that promoters employ to fragment a region’s growth plan (Clark et al., 2016). The society primarily benefits from the significant infrastructure developments that add to urban expansion as part of the rejuvenation schemes of the host region. Different regions that have until now hosted the Olympic Games have evidence for significant social developments that were realized, as described below:
- 1992 Barcelona (Spain) Olympic Games caused the creation of new recreational areas and service facilities.
- 2008 Beijing (China) Olympic Games saw the implementation of a number of beneficial environmental projects in the city.
- 2012 London (U.K.) Olympic Games resulted in the East London industrial area.
- 2016 Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) Olympic Games were part of a policy to improve the city’s urban transport system and uplift the status of the neighboring towns.
The mega sporting events also produce severe adverse effects on the social wellbeing of the host communities. The participants and audiences are drawn from diverse parts of the world that harbor different behaviors. In the course of interaction, the local communities may adopt some bad morals from the visitors, which spreads and threatens to destroy good and established social values (Kassens-Noor, 2019). The wrong morals may spread and contribute to moral degradation of the majority of the young generation.
The events require massive infrastructure that needs expansive lands to pave the way for the construction of basic amenities, such as accommodation units. This means that people residing close to the host destination may have to suffer negative effects, primarily due to relocation. During the preparations for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, the government brought down over 9,500 units of reasonably priced housing units (Duignan et al., 2019). More than $350 million in public funds were side-tracked from financing low-income social services and other support services for the poor. The country diverted these resources to be used in financing the preparation for the Olympic Games during the period from 1990 to 1995 (Charner et al., 2016). Further, the government also expelled over 15,000 people from public housing projects that it brought down to provide grounds for the construction of accommodation areas for the Olympics athletes and other dignitaries.
Furthermore, for the duration of the construction of the required infrastructure, there is the prospect of abuses on individual and human rights. Most of the countries and cities that win bids to host the mega sporting events may not have the sufficient human labor to deploy across the numerous construction sites. In a few cases, wayward contractors may resolve to engage in human rights infringements by employing underage workers (Charner et al., 2016). Other rights abuse include overworking the labor force and paying them lower wage rates that do not match the job description.
The local communities also find themselves on the receiving end, where they have to forego their usual comfortable living conditions. In preparation for the Sydney Olympic Games, the local government prevented the local tourists from accessing their regular fun areas. The area where the Bondi Beach Volleyball Stadium was being constructed was closed off for over six months. The Ryde Pool, a public facility, was as well cordoned off for more than two years as the park had to be rehabilitated into a private leisure facility for the athletes (Charner et al., 2016). Increased noises also characterize the mega sporting events as people cheer their favorite sports personalities. The surrounding neighborhoods suffer from the noise, especially children who may not have an adequate sleep.
Moreover, the Olympics Games call for heightened security that disturbs the freedoms of the local residents. The vast numbers of people attending the games lead to congestion in certain areas, which causes the authorities to impose precincts on where the native inhabitants are permitted to drive or visit. Sometimes, the host destinations experience traffic congestions for the duration of the games as vast numbers of people have to move in the exact directions at virtually the same periods. Duignan et al. (2019) state that the increased masses provide fertile ground for terrorist activities that have been on the rise. For instance, during the 1972 Olympic Games, the Israeli team suffered attacks from terrorists, the 1996 Atlanta Games also experienced bombing by terrorists.
The planning and organization of the mega sporting events can also have a bearing on the social impact of the sports activity to be hosted. The prospect of generating a positive legacy from the event can be brought down due to glitches generally ascribed to poor planning. As a consequence, the possibility of fashioning a positive sense of social unity is defeated. If not adequately involved, the local community may perceive the mega sporting event as an opening for the authorities to benefit their interests through corrupt dealings, which will create further seclusion (Charner et al., 2016). This is likely to occur where communities are displaced, therefore, disintegrating the idea of social building and illuminating the indication of poor planning. Without a doubt, the experiences can leave the community members feeling that their sense of comfort and belonging will be conceded in the longer term.
Overall Summary of the Positive and Negative Social Effects
Conclusion
A lot of countries and cities across the world prepare well-thought-out bids outlining their desire to host mega sporting events. These events draw a universal appeal through viewership and pull huge numbers of visitors. All of them want to catch a glimpse of the sports activities along with their favorite competing athletes. The mega sporting events are, for the most part, linked to developmental roles or image-making for the host area. They are further characterized by their capacity to spawn several notable effects for the host destination across different sectors such as tourism, education, social-cultural, transport and travel, and infrastructure, establishing the base for wide-range changes.
The Formula One and the Olympic Games are some of the few mega sporting events with a universal appeal. The F1 attracts a considerable international consumer interest, with the sports’ enthusiast drawn from all corners of the world. The Olympic Games are the world’s top justly universal, multisport, and triumphant sports events. Both sporting events attract comprehensive media coverage that leads to intense broadcasting to reach millions of audiences all over the globe. During the 2020 season, the F1 achieved the highest average viewers per Grand Prix at 87.4 million, while the Olympic Games customarily attracted billions of viewers globally. These two events also have a robust digital presence and with the F1 being ranked the second-fastest emergent major sports league worldwide across the leading social media platforms in 2020. The sports attract many views through the online presence, and millions of people get actively engaged through comments.
The primary pull for different destinations to host the events is the impending social impacts of the games. The host destinations desire to benefit the general public through positive social impacts accrued by hosting the mega sporting events. However, the positive effects are not realized naturally, neither are they assured. A critical feature of learning positive social impacts lies in the capacity of the host region to sustain those benefits. For the most part, the social consequences manifest in the form of both positive and negative effects, which can be tangible and intangible that impact society’s perception of the mega sporting events. The tangible social products are physical community development that is realized. In contrast, the intangible social impacts are realized in the form of soft social exchanges that raise the profile of the host community.
Some of the positive impacts include cross-cultural partnerships and exchanges, uplifting the host destination identity and national pride, creation of leisure and recreational facilities, urban infrastructural developments, promotion of sports, increased security, enhanced network development and connectivity, improved transport systems, as well as personal and career development for instance, through the construction of beneficial leisure amenities. On the other hand, the adverse effects include the exchange of bad values and morals, increased threat from terrorist attacks, traffic congestion and overcrowding, infringements on human rights, increased cases of theft and lifting, noise to the surrounding neighborhoods, corruption and benefit for a few from the projects, and displacement of people to provide grounds for hosting the sporting events.
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