The 2024 Paris Olympics: UCLA experts

Nation, World + Society

The 2024 Olympic Games are approaching, featuring all the traditional sporting competitions and some brand-new events like breaking, skateboarding and surfing. Faculty members at UCLA have deep experience and expertise in all things Olympics - from athletics, sports medicine, sports economics and international sports governance to topics like hip-hop, the threat of extreme heat and the impact of social media.

'Breaking' as an Olympic event and hip-hop culture

H. Samy Alim
Alim, professor of anthropology and faculty director of the UCLA Hip Hop Initiative, has been researching and writing about hip-hop culture for more than 25 years. His most recent book, "Freedom Moves: Hip Hop Knowledges, Pedagogies, and Futures"travels across generations and beyond borders to understand hip-hop's transformative power as one of the most important cultural movements of our time. Alim takes a nuanced view of breaking in the Olympics, balancing the celebration of individual artists and athletes against the cultural commodification of the art form and the ways its activist and community-centric roots can be stripped away by such moments.

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Economic impact of the Olympic Games

Zev Yaroslavsky
Yaroslavsky is director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and the UCLA Department of History, where he focuses on the intersection of policy, politics and history in the Los Angeles region.He was a member of the Los Angeles City Council when the city hosted the 1984 Olympics - an event that created a financial surplus that went to funding community sports. He served in public office for more than four decades, including 20 years as a Los Angeles County supervisor.

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Lee Ohanian
Ohanian is a professor of economics and an expert on the U.S. economy, economic policy, the stock market and macroeconomics. He can comment on the economic impact of the Olympic Games in Paris and the upcoming 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

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Air-condition-free Olympic Village: Heat and environmental justice risks

Bharat Venkat
Venkat is a medical anthropologist and director of the UCLA Heat Lab. Given the use of natural cooling designs instead of air-conditioning at the Olympic Village in Paris and the potention for extreme heat this summer, Venkat, a heat expert and associate professor, can comment on the physical risks to athletes in training - as well as the environmental justice implications for the low-income residents who will move into the buildings once the Games are over.

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Social media and worldwide audience engagement

Sarah Roberts
Roberts, a UCLA scholar of internet culture, politics and society, and digital labor studies, can comment on the impact of technology and social media on worldwide engagement during the Olympic Games. Roberts is faculty director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Technology & Power and a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. Her book "Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media"is a study of the global workforce of commercial content moderators whose job it is to shield against hateful language, violent videos and online cruelty uploaded by social media users.

Email:[email protected]

Sports law and legal issues

Steven Bank
Bank, a professor at UCLA School of Law, has written extensively about Olympics eligibility disputes, the reviewability of contested decisions by event officials, the interpretation and application of the World Anti-Doping Code, the operation of the Court of Arbitration for Sport and the ad hoc arbitration panels that will render decisions for issues that come up during the Games. He is also an expert on the legal power of international sports bodies and issues regarding athletes' rights around marketing and advertising.

Email:[email protected]

Physical health of athletes

UCLA Health
UCLA Health has sports medicine and orthopaedic experts available for interviews on a variety of topics, including sports injuries, athletic performance and training, as well as tips on how weekend warriors can bring out their own inner athlete during the games. As the official team physicians for USA Basketball at the Olympics, UCLA Health will also be sending five physicians to Paris to provide coverage for the men's and women's basketball national teams.

Email: [email protected]

Tags: Olympics