Every loser wins: leveraging ‘unsuccessful’ Olympic bids for positive benefits

© 2020 European Association for Sport Management. Research Question: In what ways can cities leverage an unsuccessful Olympic Games bid to bring them positive benefits? Research Methods: A multiple case study approach using the bids of Cape Town and Toronto for the 2004 and 2008 Olympic Games, respectively. Interviews were conducted with 31 stakeholders across both bids; including 19 members of the respective bid teams and a further 12 interviews with external stakeholders. This data is supplemented by documentary analysis of candidate files, promotional materials and city/council documents. Results and Findings: Despite the differing political and social contexts of the two cities studied, both utilized similar leveraging strategies. The Olympic bid process focuses those in a city, bringing together coalitions, forcing a city to take stock of its current situation and brings national interest. The bid teams utilized the threat of not being successful to lever national government funding and created leveraging bodies to deliver the strategies. Implications: The implications of this study are twofold. First, it provides cities with insight into how even an unsuccessful Olympic bid can provide benefits. Crucially, only legitimate bidders contributing to already existing plans can access government funding. Second, this research contributes to the bidding literature, providing new empirical material derived using a diverse case study approach, and to the leveraging literature through adapting, extending and updating Chalip’s (2004) conceptual model of event leverage

Demographic history and rare allele sharing among human populations

High-throughput sequencing technology enables population-level surveys of human genomic variation. Here, we examine the joint allele frequency distributions across continental human populations and present an approach for combining complementary aspects of whole-genome, low-coverage data and targeted high-coverage data. We apply this approach to data generated by the pilot phase of the Thousand Genomes Project, including whole-genome 2–4× coverage data for 179 samples from HapMap European, Asian, and African panels as well as high-coverage target sequencing of the exons of 800 genes from 697 individuals in seven populations. We use the site frequency spectra obtained from these data to infer demographic parameters for an Out-of-Africa model for populations of African, European, and Asian descent and to predict, by a jackknife-based approach, the amount of genetic diversity that will be discovered as sample sizes are increased. We predict that the number of discovered nonsynonymous coding variants will reach 100,000 in each population after ∼1,000 sequenced chromosomes per population, whereas ∼2,500 chromosomes will be needed for the same number of synonymous variants. Beyond this point, the number of segregating sites in the European and Asian panel populations is expected to overcome that of the African panel because of faster recent population growth. Overall, we find that the majority of human genomic variable sites are rare and exhibit little sharing among diverged populations. Our results emphasize that replication of disease association for specific rare genetic variants across diverged populations must overcome both reduced statistical power because of rarity and higher population divergence