Olympic legacy and cultural tourism: Exploring the facets of Athens' Olympic heritage

This study examines the effects of the Olympic Games on Athens’ cultural tourism and the city’s potential to leverage the Olympic legacy in synergy with its rich heritage in order to enhance its tourism product during the post-Games period. In doing so, a qualitative and interpretive approach was employed. This includes a literature review on Athens’ 2004 Olympics to identify the sport facilities and regeneration projects, which constitute the Olympic legacy and heritage. Based on that, an empirical analysis was undertaken, by collecting official documents about the 2004 Olympics, and conducting five semi-structured interviews with tourism/administrative officials. The findings indicate that the Olympiad contributed significantly to Athens’ built and human heritage, revealing the dimensions of new venues/facilities, infrastructure, transportation and aesthetic image of the city, and human capital enhancement. Hence, the Games affected to the multifaceted representation and reconstruction of the city’s identity and cultural heritage. However, the potential afforded from the post-Olympic Athens remains unrealised due to lack of strategic planning/management. The study concludes that there is a need to develop cross-leveraging synergies between the Olympic legacy and cultural tourism for the host city. Finally, a strategic planning framework for leveraging post-Games Olympic tourism is suggested in order to maximise the benefits of Olympic legacy and heritage in a host city’s tourism development

The Island that was not there: producing Corelli’s island, staging Kefalonia

This chapter will focus upon the contested practices and imaginations of one island whose tourist market is markedly divided between an upmarket north and mass market south. In the midst of this tense clash of tastes, the island was the setting for the book and the film of Captain Corelli’s mandolin. So this chapter moves between the Louis de Bernières’ book Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1997), the Miramax film of the book (released 2001) and the touristic experience of the island. In the year after the release of the film visitor numbers from the UK to the island, who form some 87% of those arriving by plane, rose by 22% and 10% again the year following, more strongly than growth in visitors from other countries, and growing more rapidly than British tourism to Greece in general (Hudson and Ritchie 2006: 263-4). It was by all accounts a classic case of movie driving up the popularity of a destination. This has set in play competing and complementary imaginaries of the island as landscape and beach resort – and what such beaches should be used for. Hosting the (so-called) most photographed beach in Greece, alongside beaches, or always ‘coves’, labelled as ‘romantic’ via the movie, alongside mass tourism infrastructure the chapter unpacks the production of the beach and scenery for tourists. Not least here we want to highlight the different Kefalonias imagined and those lost and found, those unobtainable and those haunting the Ionian

Corrupted Seas: the Mediterranean in the Age of Mass Mobility

As we noted in the introduction we have chosen to produce a book about Mediterranean mass tourism. Not just mass tourism that happens to take place in the Mediterranean, but the Mediterranean variety and inflection of mass tourism. With this choice we wanted to emphasize the fact that (even) mass tourism has histories and geographies. Moreover, the space of tourism has often been methodologically fragmented and marginalized as a side effect of two trends in research. First, research on tourism practices (as in many chapters in this volume) has often proceeded empirically through case studies of single destinations. Partly, this may be down to the logistics and funding of research, partly the difficulties of comparative work. Second, the space of tourism has been marginal both in academia conceptually but also on the ground – where resorts are often at the end of the line, and the edge of territories. Thus recent assessments on regeneration and decline in British resorts point to transport and communication links leaving them marginalized (Communities and Local Government Committee 2007), while for many traditions of area studies tourism areas are equally on the edge of the territory and the fading edge of the culture. This scale and focus is a variant of a methodological nationalism that is by no means confined to work on tourism. Indeed, in historiography it has often seemed that history only occurs at the scale of the nation state (Bentley 1999). However, we also want to outline some cautions on the imagining of the Mediterranean. The anthropology of Mediterranean studies has all to often given a homogeneity to the region, indeed we might say defined the region through key attributes such as cultures of ‘honour’ and ‘shame’ (Albera 2006) and notions of cultural survivalism, where the antique survives into modernity (Mitchell 2002). Critics have argued with some force and justification that while Braudel and others have argued for the Mediterranean as ‘an ecological unit’, anthropology has seen it as a culture area characterized by the presence of codes of honour and shame in gender relations of a hierarchical nature and in so doing end up opposing the primitivism of the Mediterranean with the modernity of Europe (see examples in Albera 2006: 116). As such a regionalist anthropology has colluded with a literary trope that portrays the Mediterranean through a limited range of generally cultural stereotypes of its people (Shore 1995) and a geohistoire has spoken to a region grounded in climate and agriculture – which themselves ascribe a different temporality to the region. Indeed geography has long learnt to be wary of models of cultural areas that all too often suppress heterogeneity, internal conflicts between subcultures and tend to be founded on models of rustic society (Crang 1998: 21). Where tourism is addressed at all it is as a problem, for people, places and research, not as one of the engines forging a Mediterranean regional identity. So we begin by asking what it is that a Mediterranean focus offers, first in terms of destabilising the usual categories of nation and place by focusing upon a maritime imaginary like Homer’s wine dark sea, second by looking at the analytic risks and commercial uses of fixing and exoticising the Mediterranean, and then, third, asking how mass tourism is refracted through Mediterranean practices and imaginations and the diversity of outcomes now emerging creating many Mediterraneans and many mass tourisms

Use of a Lucas-Kanade-Based Template Tracking Algorithm to Examine In Vivo Tendon Excursion during Voluntary Contraction Using Ultrasonography.

Ultrasound imaging can be used to study tendon movement during muscle contraction to estimate the tendon force-length relationship in vivo. Traditionally, such tendon displacement measurements are made manually (time consuming and subjective). Here we evaluated a Lucas-Kanade-based tracking algorithm with an optic flow extension that accounts for tendon movement characteristics between consecutive frames of an ultrasound image sequence. Eleven subjects performed 12 voluntary isometric plantar flexion contractions on a dynamometer. Simultaneously, the gastrocnemius medialis tendon was visualized via ultrasonography. Tendon displacement was estimated manually and by using two different automatic tracking algorithms. Maximal tendon elongation (manual: 17.9 ± 0.3 mm, automatic: 17.0 ± 0.3 mm) and tendon stiffness (209 ± 4 N/mm, 218 ± 5 N/mm) generated by the developed algorithm correlated with those obtained with the manual method (0.87 ≤ R ≤ 0.91), with no differences between methods. Our results suggest that optical flow methods can potentially be used for automatic estimation of tendon movement during contraction in ultrasound images, which is further improved by adding a penalty function