Last Updated: Mar 5, 11:53 am
Category: OpenCities Projects
A workshop in February 2007 chaired by Open Cities MD Marc Stephens at London’s New Connaught Rooms looked at the opportunities for universities arising out of the London 2012 Olympic Games.
Sponsored by the Guardian Newspaper, the workshop was part of a three day conference on Higher Education with speakers including Minister of Higher Education Bill Rammell, Shadow Minister Boris Johnson, and leaders of Higher Education institutions from across the world.
Learning from Sydney and others, universities in the UK are looking at ways of maximizing the benefits of the 2012 Olympic Games. London Higher, the Higher Education Regional Association for London, has taken on the lead role of coordinating the collaborative UK HE and also FE efforts.
The real association between universities and Olympic sports however derives from the central role that universities play in actually providing the Games with their central actors, the athletes themselves. In the second half of the modern Olympic period, between 1952 and 2004, Team USA scored an average 211 points while Team Europe scored an average of just 127 points, reversing the Europeans dominance of the first half of the century. This reversal mirrored the take-off of investment and participation in higher education in the US resulting in success not just in numbers of Nobel Prizes, but also in medals won at the Olympic Games.
