Andrew Zimbalist’s scientific contributions

The Olympic Games are among the largest and most visible sporting events in the world. Every two years, the world’s best athletes from some 200 countries come together to compete in lavish new venues in front of thousands of spectators. Hundreds of millions of sports fans worldwide watch the Games on television. Although Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the modern Olympics in the late 19th century, may have had altruistic, idealistic notions of pure amateur competition, unsullied by financial motivations, the Olympic Games have become a big business. The participants are effectively professional athletes; the organizers are highly compensated, professional bureaucrats; hosting the Games involves huge construction and renovation projects that take nearly a decade to complete, and these expenditures are usually justified by claims of extraordinary economic benefits that will accrue to the host city or region as a direct result of hosting the Games. This article examines the financing of the Olympic Games, explores how the awarding of the Games has become a high-stakes contest, and analyzes the costs of running the Games and their economic impact on the host city and nation.

This paper undertakes three challenging tasks. First, I attempt to lay out the dimensions of the current financial crisis that confronts intercollegiate athletics. Second, I propose three reforms that I believe, if enacted, would go a long way toward ameliorating the financial situation and also bring the practice of college sports more in line ethically with its purported mission. Third, I assess the prospects of these reforms being carried out, given the history of failed reform efforts in the past.

In Circling the Bases, leading sports economist Andrew Zimbalist continues his discussion and analysis of the major issues and challenges confronting the sports industry in the second decade of the 21st century. Presenting a general overview of the sports business at both the college and professional levels, this volume places concerns such as the antitrust status of sports leagues, the stalled progress of gender equity in college sports, and the control of Performance Enhancing Drugs in historical context. Zimbalist also provides a deeper understanding of how sports have fared and changed with the sharpening financial crisis and 2009 economic downturn-from the morphing role of salary caps and revenue distribution and the rapid escalation of college coaches' compensation to the financing of sports facilities and the economic impact of hosting the Olympic Games. In Circling the Bases, Zimbalist continues to show how the business of sports is evolving and how the sports industry is becoming more closely linked with the corporate sector and thus more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the U.S. and world economies. Zimbalist deftly shows how sports are facing the uncertainties of the future and what the implications are for sports fans, players, owners, and leagues.