While the Olympics are a show of international friendship and
athletic excellence, they are also about politics and diplomacy,
tourism, social change and spectacle, and sometimes even espionage.
“The Olympics has the potential to be such a positive
force for good in the world,” says York University Faculty of
Health Associate Professor Hernán
Humaña, a three-time Olympic coach
who teaches a course on the history of the Olympic Games and will
be in Paris July 26 onward cheering on his
daughter, Melissa
Humana-Paredes. “Every Olympics
strives to meet its ideals, and every Olympics falls short — but I
am an optimist, I believe each Olympics gets better and
better.”
Humaña and other York experts are available to
give comment to media on everything from nationalism in
sport and why the economic pressures on athletes are getting even
worse, to branding and tourism opportunities, the evolution of
women’s basketball in Canada and how large sporting events
intersect with sex tourism and displacement of low-income people,
and more.
Hernán Humaña
Humaña, who helped Canada secure a bronze
in the Atlanta ’96 games, teaches in the Department of Kinesiology
and Health Science at York University. He was an early coach for
his daughter, who along with her Canadian beach-volleyball
partner and fellow York alumna Brandie Wilkerson, is currently
ranked fourth in the world and is in Paris competing for a
medal. Humaña played for the Chilean national volleyball team
and came to Canada as a political refugee during the Pinochet
years, a journey which he documented in his book Playing Under
The Gun: An Athlete's Tale of Survival in 1970s Chile. He is
available from Paris to comment on the history of the Olympics and
how political and social events intersect and affect the modern
games from their inception in the late 1800s to
now. Humaña can also offer interviews in
Spanish.
Topics he can speak to
include:
- Sport and nationalism
- Gender issues in sport
- Compensation and treatment of athletes
Parissa Safai
The Canada Soccer drone-spying controversy is, in part, a great
example of how much more aggressive Canada has become on the
international sport scene in pursuit of wins, says Parissa
Safai, professor in the Faculty of Health and Chair of the School
of Kinesiology and Health Science.
“In many ways, the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics marked a
pronounced shift in Canada’s attitudes towards success on the
Olympic stage and our high-performance sport system became even
that much more intentional about ‘owning the podium’,” says Safai.
“For an athlete, gold medal-winning performances demand not just an
unconditional commitment to physical training and skill
development, but presuppose disposable money and disposable time,
as the financial support from governments is just not
enough.”
Many athletes are highly reliant on their parents for financial
support, and the costs of producing a gold-medal winning
performance has gone up, adds Safai, putting more pressure on
high-performance athletes, and making their finances even more
precarious. Safai is an expert in the
sociology of sport, health and social inequality. She is available
for phone and video conference interviews and can speak to:
· Sports
medicine and sports related pain and injury
· Sport
risk-taking
· Sport and
social inequality and gender equity in sport
· Barriers
to physical activity in communities
· Sport
policy and governance
Vijay Setlur
“France is already the most visited country in the world, but
hosting the Olympics would diversify the destination and its
visitor economy,” says Vijay Setlur, a marketing instructor at
York University’s Schulich School of Business specializing in
sports marketing and tourism marketing. “People visit the country
for its museums, galleries, architecture and culinary offerings,
but Paris will now be able to attract more international sporting
events to capitalize on the growing sport tourism segment and
elevate its status as a sports city.”
Setlur attended and gave commentary at FIFA World Cup
Qatar 2022 and is also a consultant for Concacaf (Confederation of
North, Central America and Caribbean Association
Football). Setlur is available to comment
on:
- Canadian soccer drone scandal and how it might affect the
perception of Canada Soccer and sponsorship activity
- Sponsorships and the Paris Olympic Games
- How the NFL and ICC are hoping to leverage flag football and
cricket, making its debut at the LA28 Games, to engage younger
consumers
- TV ratings and viewership of the Games
- Use of technology at the Olympics
Sarah Bay-Cheng
“For me, sports is another kind of performance: It's aesthetic,
it's time-based, there's an audience,”
says Professor Sarah Bay-Cheng, dean of the School of the
Arts, Media, Performance and Design at York University and a former
NCAA basketball player. “As the playwright Sarah Kane once said,
the difference between theater and a football (soccer) match is
that you don't know how the football match is going to
end.”
Bay-Cheng’s research focuses on the intersection of performance
and media, including how digital technologies create performance
conditions in museums and other cultural heritage sites. In this
capacity, she is co-curating a gallery exhibition for the Museum of
Toronto on the history of basketball in Toronto that will open in
the spring of 2025.
“In Toronto basketball didn’t follow a linear development.
Different versions of the game emerged at different times and in
different places. Part of the work of preparing the exhibition has
been to dig into the history of basketball in Canada and what has
made Toronto such an exceptional place for the sport. As a former
player, I’ve been very interested in learning more about the
history of women's basketball in Canada as relation to, but also
very distinctive from the history of the sport in the United
States.”
Bay-Cheng is available to comment on the history of
basketball in Canada, particularly the women’s
game:
- The American and Canadian roots of the game
- How women’s basketball started among primarily white,
upper-class women in the U.S., Ontario and eastern Canada, and why
they were no match for a team from Western Canada that adopted a
more aggressive style of play
- How Title IX in the U.S. was a game-changer for
women’s basketball
- How both the men’s and women’s games have become more
international, with training concentrated in NCAA schools
- Sports as mediated performance
Amanda De Lisio
During the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games, Faculty
of Health Assistant Professor Amanda De Lisio partnered
with researchers in Rio de Janeiro to examine what happened with
sex workers during the Games.
“One of the narratives that follows the sport mega-event is
related to the involvement of human trafficking,” says De Lisio in
the School of Kinesiology and Health Science. “We work with
people who are often the target of these anti-trafficking
strategies to find out what is actually happening on the ground,
are they being trafficked or exploited in their labour? And how
their patterns of labour and migration in the city may change as a
result of the mega event.”
De Lisio is working with groups in Los Angeles, which will host
the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the 2027 Super Bowl, and the 2028 Olympic
Games to examine what is happening on the ground there ahead of the
games. Her latest paper, published earlier this month, looks
at the security apparatus of the Rio Olympics, and argues that
“despite the enormous investment and facade of newly militarized
host communities, insecurities remained, and ‘security’ as a
practice failed to be guaranteed.” De
Lisio is also available for interviews in
Portuguese.
She can comment on:
- Understanding sex work as labour in a vulnerable sector and how
displacement brought on by mega-events affects sex workers and
other communities
- Sport mega-event construction and the financialization of
housing
- Local groups in Paris decrying Olympics-related displacement of
low-income people
Please check online for updates to
this roster.
For a list of some of the York-affiliated athletes and
medical team members participating in the
Games, please see
here.
-30-
York University is a modern, multi-campus, urban university
located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students,
faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global
perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive
change, and prepare our students for success. York's fully
bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of
Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary
Education. York’s campuses in Costa Rica and India offer students
exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative
programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities,
our planet, and our future.
Media Contact: Emina Gamulin, York
University Media Relations,
437-217-6362, egamulin@yorku.ca
Emina Gamulin
York University
437-217-6362
egamulin@yorku.ca