What does the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and space politics have to do with each other? Quite a lot and it demonstrates China’s ability to mix sport and politics in their national self-promotion, writes senior analyst Stanis Elsborg.

When the Japanese people now faces dramatic cost overruns while preparing the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, they are not the first to learn a hard economic lesson. A recent academic study argues that the Olympic Games are naturally subject to severe cost overruns, while the IOC criticises the study for mixing budgets and attributing non-Olympic costs to the Olympic budget. This article examines claims and counter-claims in the debate about Olympic costs.

IOC President Thomas Bach made it very clear in his New Year’s speech that politics should be kept out of the Olympics to protect the event’s neutrality. However, it is a paradox that IOC’s characterisation of politicisation only seems to apply to athletes and not the host nations, writes Play the Game’s analyst Stanis Elsborg.

At the start of 2019, it was fair to say there was no single transnational anti-mega-event movement. In a matter of months, this changed as anti-Olympics organisers from Rio de Janeiro, Pyeongchang and Seoul, Tokyo, Paris, and Los Angeles came together in Tokyo in July with the goal of solidifying their transnational connections into an active movement against the Olympic Games.

On the eve of the IAAF World Athletic Championship in Doha, new media reports of a corrupt bidding process tarnished the host country Qatar. Two weeks ago, Amnesty International accused the country of one more breach of the promise to improve workers’ rights. But according to the International Labour Organisation, Qatar has also made great progress and more is to come.

At Play the Game 2019, top speakers from organisations such as FIFA, EOC and UEFA as well as advocates for human rights will present their thoughts and views on the future and challenges in relation to mega-events and human rights issues.

One year before the opening of the Summer Olympics in Tokyo there is considerable resistance to the so-called ‘Reconstruction Games’ in Japan that critics fear will remove focus from the Fukushima disaster and undermine democratic values.

The 2019 Copa América will be the biggest event held in Brazil since the 2016 Olympics attracting up to 100,000 spectators from abroad. But it will also be a sporting event with a maximum-security set-up held in the shadows of former corruption scandals.