The thesis investigates the position of Olympism in international relations. The introductory chapters deal with institutional structure of the Olympic Movement, which is headed by the International Olympic Committee. The following chapters examine Olympism in connection with selected political issues. These are political interests of states and other subjects, conflicts and cooperation among states. The question of boycotts is addressed in a separate chapter. The aim of the thesis is to evaluate the role of Olympism in international relations in a comprehensive manner. The thesis uses several historical examples that show how the Olympic Movement coped with given political challenges. From the mentioned examples and the evaluation of development, the most important factors for Olympism are finally deduced, i.e. commercialization, mediatization and politicization.

According to the Olympic Charter, “the aim of Olympic Solidarity is to organise assistance to National Olympic Committees, in particular those which have the greatest need”. For the last five decades funding from the sale of Broadcasting Rights for the Olympic Games, allocated to the National Olympic Committees, has been channelled through Olympic Solidarity as a means of promoting development. The aim of this research was therefore to evaluate the extent to which this redistributive claim is evidenced through an analysis of the distribution of the Olympic Solidarity funding, and an insight into the life histories of people involved in the process of allocating grant aid for Olympic Solidarity's World Programme funding.

This thesis presents a sociological critique of the concept of legacy as it surrounded the London 2012 Paralympic Games. A sociological approach was adopted to challenge much of the spontaneous sociology that surrounds the ascendancy of legacy within the Olympic and Paralympic space. Legacy, disability and the Paralympic Games are the predominant structures of the research problem. The literature review attempts to present a sociology of the sociological approaches in these fields. Underpinning the research design is Bourdieu et al. s (1991) epistemological hierarchy which consists of and proceeds from the break , the construction of a conceptual framework to the empirical design. This hierarchy contributed to the repositioning of legacy from the pursuit of cause and effect, or rather away from the pursuit of legitimacy and illegitimacy, of London 2012 to a study of the proposed and imposed causes and effects, legitimations and illegitimations of it. Aligned to this repositioning is the primary collection of data through interviews with five different institutional fields: government, media, corporate sponsors, disability sport and disability institutions. The research findings present a positional analysis of the inter- and intra-relations of these respective fields. In the discussion key symbolic struggles and issues are presented for each field with particular attention given to the development of the positive leaning and legitimising best ever Paralympic narrative and to the commercial and political legitimacy of the London 2012 Paralympic Games. It is concluded that legacy is ultimately a symbolic struggle of different visions of respective agents and institutions that are unable to achieve these absolute visions or ends.

This thesis examines the struggle for equal gender representation in the Olympic swimming and athletics arena. It investigates the relationship in participation and representation between men and women in athletics and swimming from the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 to Rio de Janeiro in 2016.  When the modern Olympic Games resumed in 1896, they had been recreated by a group of privileged men. These men had created a forum for the aristocratic masculine world and initially had no intention of including women in their creation.  The contemporaries around the turn of the century in 1900 considered women to be weak, inappropriate and that femininity was the exact opposite of everything that the masculine competitive sport represented. Muscle, fitness and sweat were not something that the weak female bodies would be associated with. Man was created for the public sphere and woman for the home domains. The sports movement was a mirror of the prevailing privileged upper-class society and came to conform to the prevailing social and culturally constructed norms that were prevalent in the meantime. The women made a first breakthrough in the masculine sports sphere in the early 20th century and then they managed to make a real breakthrough in the 1920s. This created concern among the privileged men. Should women athletes change in a more masculine direction, would they even lose interest in traditional female responsibilities such as home and family formation?  The struggle for equal representation continued throughout the 20th century and only in connection with the feminine radicalization of the 1960s and 1970s as a real change did it begin to be seen again in the Olympic competition arenas and only after the turn of the millennium has real equality regarding representation been achieved.  In this thesis, I have studied  the athletics and swimming women inclusion to into the Olympic space. I spotlight how the two sports have developed from an equality and gender equality point of view. My survey prove a clear connection and have put figures on men and women's participation and demonstrated inequalities in the Olympic space.