How to activate the Olympic legacy: a selection of inspiring initiatives from Olympic Host Cities

The value of experience is indisputable. Keeping the Flame Alive! gathers colourful, lively and concrete examples of how Olympic Host Cities and Olympic legacy stakeholders manage to activate Olympic legacy. It is a collection of inspiring stories from Olympic Hosts around the world who have successfully managed projects powered by the unique link between their city and the hosting of the Olympic Games. These cities have shared both their vision and their methodology so that these cases can be studied, adapted and applied by others. This collection’s overarching goal is to be used as a tool box by other cities. It is the go-to source of information for city officials, public administrators and sporting administrators of Olympic Cities as well as anyone who is interested in learning from their peers on how success can be achieved. Each of the initiatives included in this collection are aligned with the mission of the World Union of Olympic Cities to facilitate and qualify an on-going dialogue between former and future hosts. It allows Members of the World Union of Olympic Cities to stay engaged with the organisation and with one another.

Motivation to activate the Olympic legacy goes far beyond reigniting the glorious Olympic past and recollecting memories of a unique moment of the city’s history. Although it refers to the cities’ Olympic history, Keeping the Flame Alive! is first about the present and the future of Olympic Host Cities. It is about how the past can be built upon to boost the present and prepare the future.

Olympic Cities form a privileged group as they share an experience that a huge number of other cities dream of living someday – the experience of hosting the Olympic Games. And shared experience is at the heart of what the Union is about. It is also at the heart of this Olympic Legacy Toolkit. It is about the benefits Cities and the Union can create from working together in the context of their common Olympic heritage. It is about sharing successes so that other Members can learn from these successes, improving cities and the lives of those that live in them. It is about connecting with one another to achieve this in the most efficient way possible.

Olympic Cities have their uniqueness in common. But each Olympic City is also unique and has its own assets to be valued. The Olympic Legacy Toolkit allows Cities to share this uniqueness and make the most out of it. Each of the fantastic initiatives contained in the Keeping the Flame Alive! collection is to help spread the good work that each of our Members is doing and to simultaneously inspire fellow Members to do the same.

This toolkit has been made possible thanks to the participation and the involvement of the Cities themselves that have accepted to share not only their pride, their knowledge, their results and their success but also the challenges they faced, the weaknesses they overcame and the lessons they learnt from these various projects. The Union warmly thanks all Olympic Cities for being part of this journey. As Keeping the Flame Alive! is by its very nature a lively tool, there will be more cases to come and Cities are invited to propose new experiences to share!

The majority of these cases were collected and formatted between 2015 and 2021. Some projects (and their hyperlinks) may no longer be active. Nonetheless, the experiences shared, and the inspiration provided remain relevant.