Olympics Contact Zone

Contact zones of the Olympics As Mary Louise Pratt defined in “Arts of the Contact Zone”, contact zones are social spaces where cultural interactions happen; including cultural exchange, conflicts, understanding, and sometimes unbalance of power in contact zones. Relating closely to cultural diversity, contact zones definitely exist in global events around the world, when people from different places gather together and communicate with one another. The Olympics, as one of the most influential global sports event people can ever experience, produce especially unique contact zones through the clash of culture, competition and conflicts, also along with unavoidable power unbalances. Contact zones cannot exist without cultural contrast and difference
Places like airports that consists of huge amount of international transportations every single day get even more crowded during the existence of the contact zone of Olympics. Rio Airports in Brazil prepared for long to welcome the sudden boost of tourism attracted to the summer Rio Olympics (Abelardo), the amount of tourist that crowded the airport even caused police protest during time of the games. Aside for the minor problems the sport event caused, this sign proves the amount of interest all around the world being attracted to this contact zone, and more importantly, the bursting amount of cultural interaction as people are actually visiting the host countries. Some past host cities of Olympics are London, Barcelona, Sarajevo, Paris, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Beijing (Sablich); all these cities had welcomed large amount of tourist during the time of Olympics. This event further created an even larger contact zone, that so many different people from different countries visiting one place at the same time, leading to a more complex and closely interacted time of global
As the cultures clash, meet, and grapple, this contact zone of the Olympics not only shows the diversely differences between different nations, but also brings us together as one through these universal sport competition, letting the world knows that we are all different but unified at this moment of