For ambitious civic and national boosts sport mega-events provide
unique opportunities for the pursuit of symbolic politics—a chance to signal
important changes of direction, reframe dominant narratives about the host,
and/or reinforce key messages of change. These signals or narratives are
critical vehicles of legitimation, with both narrowly instrumental objectives and
more expansive purposes related to the mobilisation of societal support for
certain dominant ‘ideas of the state’. This paper explores the realm of symbolic
politics through a comparative analysis of three disparate mega-event hosts
which will take the world stage in 2010: South Africa (the FIFA World Cup),
Delhi/India (the Commonwealth Games), and Vancouver/Canada (the Winter
Olympics). The paper argues that despite important differences in the
circumstances of these hosts and the events they are to mount, there are some
key commonalities in the narratives they seek to deploy and the subtexts they
embody. These commonalities revolve around a paradoxical blending of
inclusive, transcendent, or cosmopolitan narratives on the one hand, and
competitive, differentiating narratives of ‘world class’ aspirations and
achievements, on the other. Strikingly then, these widely dispersed events have
become vehicles for similar messages with potentially contradictory implications.