A Notable Endeavor: The Nature and Significance of Olympic Education in the Pre-and Post-Period of Beijing's 2008 Olympic Games

This study investigated the nature and significance of Beijing’s Olympic education\ninitiative from its inception seven years before the 2008 Olympic Games to 2015, seven years\nafter the conclusion of the great festival. As exploratory research, this study is the first to cover\nthis academic topic. In 2001, commensurate with Beijing’s award of the 2008 Olympic Summer\nGames, a non-governmental “grassroots team” initiated an Olympic Education and Olympic\nSpirit initiative in a small sample of Beijing’s primary and secondary schools. The team was led\nby a Canadian-trained professor, Dongguang Pei. In 2005, impressed with Pei’s and his team’s\ninitiative, and following the International Olympic Committee’s guidelines for host cities\nmounting Olympic Education initiatives, the Chinese government endorsed and supported an\nOlympic Education Legacy initiative called the Olympic Action Plan. The Chinese government’s\nsupport of disseminating Olympic knowledge to 400 million Chinese youth nationwide presented\nChinese schools, the IOC, and the world with a model for a comprehensive, vigorous, and what\nsome have judged a highly successful public and private school Olympic education program.\nCompared with the unique Olympic education program presented throughout the seven\nyear period before and during the 2008 Olympic Games, in the seven years following (2008-2015),\nthe carefully and energetically-built program of Olympic Education deteriorated badly. The\nChinese government abandoned its leadership and enterprise in sustaining Olympic Education.\nBased on the investigation sample, “Olympic education activities” in the program’s “model\nschools” deteriorated abruptly after 2008. Funding, Olympic Education teacher training, and\ninternational school partner associations ceased. On-site observation and interviews resulted in the\nfinding that Yangfangdian Central Primary school, the pioneer school of Beijing’s Olympic\neducation, remained the only model school which retained Olympic education activity after the\niii\n2008 Games. During the post-Games period, Beijing’s Olympic education was replaced by new\ngovernment approaches to education. This study needs to be understood within China’s unique\nsocial, educational and political climate. On the one hand, a centralized political system ensured\nthat Olympic education be implemented under extremely powerful organizational orders. These\norders guaranteed not only financial and human resources support, but also the climate for\nOlympic education to expand extremely quickly through multiple administrative levels. On the\nother hand, and correspondingly, the disappearance of Olympic education after the Games was,\nmost certainly, due chiefly to the government’s withdrawal of initiative and support. It is a\njustifiable conclusion that the Chinese centralized system, though enabling the program at its\noutset and early development periods, in the end rapidly constrained the entire initiative.

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