The culture in sports

Hey folks!

The last two days, I went to Tyrol where I earned my bachelor degree from 2006 to 2009. I gave a short presentation to the students of the "Sports, Culture and Event Management" program, which I am an alumni of. When I was applying for admission in mid-2006, I thought that this course of studies was just a perfect way for me to combine my interests in sports (I was still an active athlete then) and culture (I was a journalist for a youth culture/music magazine). I hope now it becomes clearer, why I am so happy to be a Young Ambassador. After all, the YOG are a picture perfect match of how to apply my curriculum in the real world.

To give you a better impression of what I studied (a task I am still busy doing when talking to my (grand) parents)), I'll just give you a short overview of the program. Since I earned a BA in Business, I spent the first two semesters with law, business administration, HR management and accounting (God, how I hated those accounting records - if you don't know what that is, neither do I!). Later on, we also started out with sport and cultural sciences as well as sports and culture management. In the third year, it was time to gain some practical experience and get to see the world. So first of all, I did an exchange semester in Paris, before doing a 6 months internship in New York.

As I mentioned in the introduction, for me the YOG are a great way to apply my knowledge into practice. Because one of the most important things I learned during my studies was that sports, culture and events are not three isolated pillars, but rather three components of one big whole. Let's take the YOG as an example: I guess I don't have to bother to explain where sports and event part comes in here - being given the fact that's one hell of a sport event. However, in addition, we have this great Culture and Education program, where the athletes are taught skills an values that will definitely come in handily on their way to becoming champions.

But even if you take the traditional Olympics (do the YOG a favor and justice by not refering to them as 'real Olympics', since the YOG are very real as well!) that unfortunately don't have a CEP yet, you'll discover that there is plenty of culture in there. If you think about the Olympics and take what comes to your mind: The five rings, the torch relay, the opening ceremony etc.. Those are all symbols and rituals that have grown over decades and sometimes even centuries.

Now with the YOG, we face the formidable task of being part of an organization as powerful and established as the Olympic Movement, yet with the challenge of forming something new. So we - the IOC, the SYOGOC, the Young Ambassadors and mainly the youngsters worldwide - have to think about a way to take the underlying message of Olympism and transform them to be used with new instruments and media. This is of course a very exciting task, since we are all part of something really big and unique. And even tough sports and culture tend to be seen as two opposites, they actually share the same roots.