Performance

Despite the uniformity in the views of majority of the NOCs acknowledging that the Games had generally been well organised and managed, a recurring issue that was raised by all the NOCs was their poor performance at the Games evident in the few number of medals won. Though satisfied with the project management of the Games, most of the NOCs gave the impression that their definition of a successful Olympic Games was not complete if their NOC had performed poorly in the Games.

Only 10 countries out of the 53 African countries that participated in the London 2012 Olympics won medals at the Games, with two of these countries being first-time medal winners at the Olympics. The total number of medals won by African countries was 34. Though this statistic hasn’t been significantly different for Africa in the Olympics since the new millennium begun in 2000 with the Sydney Games, some of the participants expressed that their performance in the London Olympics had been poorer than that of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, especially because some of the bigger African countries expected to win medals in London did not do so.

In emphasising this point, giving his thoughts on the success of the Games, B01 made the following comment:

“I will say that as far as we are concerned as…our expectations were quite high and as a team we did not live to that expectation. There was a general feeling we performed very poorly especially compared to how we performed in Beijing in 2008. But I realised it was not only about our team...most of the African countries also performed below expectation”.

This comment was re-echoed by J01 who said:

“…In the last Olympic Games, the performance of Africans was quite poor compared to how it was in Beijing and the reason for this is that the competition is getting greater and greater and higher and higher so if we do not receive any sponsorship we will be at the bottom all the time”.

When asked to clarify why he didn’t consider the London Olympics to be successful, J01 again responded from a performance perspective pointing out that the reason for this was;

“…Because firstly, we did not get any medals and most of our athletes in the middle and longer distances didn't get to the final round or the semi-finals. It is only in the marathon where two…athletes finished as part of the top fifty”.

On the issue of poor performance, Q01 expressed displeasure with the way his country’s NOC had performed in the London Olympics. Winning only one gold medal in the Games, Q01 maintained that this had been one of the country’s poorest Olympic competitions:

“We won only one medal in London and for a country of our standard and experience in the Olympics, this was a very poor outcome. We won two medals in Beijing, which wasn’t so good, but was better than one. Our performance in Olympics is something we take very seriously and we are now back on the drawing board to try and figure out ways of making sure this doesn’t happen again in 2016 when we go to Brazil”.

Another NOC representative that felt disappointed with his country’s performance in the London Olympics, despite winning one medal (first gold medal since 1972) was S01:

“We are pleased to have won a gold medal on London 2012, considering that the performance from African countries was generally very poor. But from a bigger picture, you can see that we still have a long way to go when you compare our performance to those of other athletes we compete against from other countries. We still have a lot to learn in this part of the world”.

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The feeling of disappointment was again expressed by L01 who made the following remarks:

Of course we are very disappointed we didn’t win any medal at the Games. We are not pleased with the way we performed in the Games. We still have a lot to learn and we believe things will be more positive next time”.

Some NOC representatives such as A01, C01, D01 and K01 claimed that despite not winning any medals at the London Olympics, their participation at the Games meant success to them because they had gained experience and had learnt valuable lessons, which they would not have otherwise achieved without participating.

Going by the responses from this section of questions, which suggested that the big issue for most of these NOCs was not on the project management of the London Olympics, but on their poor performance at the Games, it was necessary to conduct further investigation with a narrowed focus on the performances of these countries at the Games, as well as the issues that led to such performances. Also, it was important to get some more insight on how the NOCs measured success in order to better understand their performance at the Games.

Summary of discussion from first phase

Following the responses obtained from the questionnaires, a total of twenty countries, through their NOC representatives, consented to taking part in the interview phase of the study. The focus of the interview with the twenty NOC representatives had been primarily to address the initial research issue, which was to obtain the views of the African NOCs concerning their participation and overall outcome of the 2012 London Olympics Games. Thus, the interview questions were broken down into three categories. The first set of questions were background related questions about the participant, the NOC they represent and their role within the NOC, in order to ensure they were suitable to speak on behalf of their NOC. The next set of questions sought to find out the respective views of the NOCs, through their representatives, concerning the outcome of the London Olympic Games as a project, with a view to establishing whether it had been a success or not. The last set of questions centred on the performances of the participants’ NOCs/countries in the Olympic Games.

 Background of participants

From the findings, it was discovered that, as at the time interviews were conducted, the participants were mostly chief executive officers (CEO) of their respective National Olympic Committees such as Presidents, Secretary-Generals and Assistant Secretary-Generals. This suggested that the participants were in an a strong position to possess valid information about their country’s NOC, especially as it concerned the London 2012 Olympics, which they had all been involved in. To further prove that they were in suitable positions to speak on behalf of their NOC, participants such as B01, E01 and H01 revealed that they had played the role of chef-de-mission for their NOCs for the London Olympics, placing on them the responsibility of overseeing the country’s entire delegation at the Games. Other participants such as D01, J01, L01 and O01 doubled-up as team managers for their NOCs with the key task of managing and coordinating their countries’ Olympic teams during the Games.

From the findings, it was also revealed that the majority of the participants had been long serving members of their NOCs and had each been involved in the planning and coordination of their respective countries in at least two Olympic tournaments. This further suggested that the participants possessed valid knowledge of the key issues within their NOC considered to be relevant to the study, which was an advantage to the researcher. The long-standing status of the participants in their various NOCs allowed them to demonstrate a full awareness of the affairs of their NOC in answering interview questions. The interview transcript attached in the appendix shows a more detailed background of the participants.

Although the participants in the first phase of interviews had been mainly CEOs of their NOCs, it is important to point out again that other participant groups were included in the later phase of the interviews to provide a richer content to the data obtained. This is discussed further in section 4.5.

 Outcome of the London Olympics - success/failure

In providing their thoughts on whether the 2012 London Olympics had been successful or not, the majority of the participants agreed that the Games had been successfully hosted. The participants generally attributed the success of the Games to

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volunteers, effective communication, good transport systems and good hospitality. Some of these factors have also been identified in the literature as relevant to the success of project. Examples of these include factors such as, planning (Johnson et al., 2001), adequate funding (Zwikael and Globerson, 2006), communication (Turner, 1993) and personnel/human resource (Belout and Gauvreau, 2004). Although the extent to which these factors influenced the outcome of the Games wasn’t investigated further as it was outside the scope of the research, their reoccurrence in the data conforms to existing literature, which suggests that these factors are critical to project success.

Despite the majority of the participant maintaining that the London Olympics project had been successfully managed, a few of the participants took an opposing standpoint. Participants like I01, M01, A01, O01 and L01 all had poor experiences with certain areas of the organisation of the Games such as transportation, volunteers and language interpretation. From the views expressed by the participants about these experiences, it was evident that their opinions about the outcome of the Olympic Games were hugely influenced by these poor experiences.

 Performance

A more prominent theme that seemed to have occurred the most from this phase of interviews was the poor performance of the African countries at the London Olympic Games. Though the focus of the interviews had been on project management of the Games, the participants were more concerned about the poor performance of their country’s NOCs at the Games and were more willing to speak about this. Most of the participants admitted that their definition of success of an Olympic event was incomplete without taking into account the performance of their country at that event. As such, while the participants agreed that the 2012 London Olympics had been a successful project, they were reluctant to admit it was not an absolute success from the point of view of their NOCs due to the poor performances of their countries at the Games. These performances, according to participants, were reflected in the limited number of medals won by their countries. To put things into perspective, only 10 countries out of the 53 African countries that participated in the London 2012 Olympics won medals at the Games, with two of these countries being first-time

medal winners at the Olympics. The total number of medals won by African countries was 34.

The issue of poor performance of African countries in the Olympics was highlighted in the literature review by Johnson and Ali (2004), Bernard and Busse (2004) and Forrest et al. (2010). The re-emergence of this issue in the findings from this phase of interviews suggested that there was need to explore the issue more critically to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon. This change in focus resulted in the re- adjustment of the research question, aim and objects, and also brought about the need for the researcher to conduct a new phase of interviews with the participants in order to investigate the factors that influenced their performances at the Games. The refocusing of the study priorities based on the findings from this phase of the research further illustrates the characteristics of the interpretive research paradigm already enunciated in Chapter three. This has to do with the inevitability of change(s) in an interpretive study and the formation of new research aims and objectives as such change(s) occur (Orlikowski and Baroudi, 1991; Walker, 1997 and Kim, 2003).

The next section presents and discusses the findings from the second phase of interviews with the participants as a follow-up to the first interview phase. The aim of conducting the follow-up was to critically investigate the issue of poor performance in the Games and to attempt to identify the factors that accounted for it.