The NOlympics Anywhere movement: how local anti-Olympic resistance went global
A new academic chapter traces how scattered local resistance to Olympic Games hosting evolved into a coordinated transnational movement — and examines what it would take to turn protest into structural change at the IOC.
The chapter, “NOlympics Anywhere: Building a Transnational Anti-Olympic Movement,” is written by Adam Talbot and published in Sport, Activism, and Social Movements: International Perspectives (Routledge, 2026). Drawing on scholar-activist engagement across Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Los Angeles, and Tokyo, Talbot documents roughly two decades of network-building among communities facing Olympic displacement and traces the emergence of what he calls a genuinely global counter-movement.
From local resistance to transnational network
Anti-Olympic organizing has existed almost as long as the modern Games themselves, but it remained largely siloed — each host city developing its opposition independently, with little coordination across borders. The chapter maps how that began to change as activists recognized a structural asymmetry: the IOC operates as a transnational body selecting host cities globally, while resistance remained local and therefore limited.
The turning point came in July 2019, when anti-Olympics organizers from Rio de Janeiro, Pyeongchang, Tokyo, Paris, and Los Angeles convened for the first-ever transnational anti-Olympic summit, timed to coincide with exactly one year before the originally scheduled start of the Tokyo Games. What followed — a large demonstration in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, months of collaborative digital organizing, a joint statement, and a zine documenting the summit’s lessons — marked an unprecedented moment of international coordination.
Participating organizations included NOlympics LA (formed in 2017 within the Democratic Socialists of America’s Los Angeles chapter), the Paris-based NON aux JO2024, the Anti Pyeongchang Olympic Alliance, the Popular Committee on the World Cup and Olympics from Rio, the Counter Olympics Network from London, and groups from Seoul and Jakarta. The hashtag #NOlympicsAnywhere became the movement’s connective tissue.
Shared critiques, shared tactics
Despite different local contexts, the groups converge on a core set of grievances: that hosting the Olympics accelerates real estate speculation and displacement of low-income and unhoused residents; that it brings intensified policing, surveillance, and militarization of public space; and that it prioritizes corporate and IOC profit over community needs, often with environmental costs that outlast the Games themselves.
In Tokyo, the Kasumigaoka public housing complex was demolished to build the new National Stadium, and municipal sweeps targeted unhoused people in areas near venues. Rio’s Vila Autódromo community — forcibly displaced to make way for the 2016 Olympic Park — became a symbol of these recurring patterns. Paris residents opposing the 2024 Games raised parallel concerns about Seine-Saint-Denis, where Games infrastructure was concentrated in one of the city’s most precarious banlieues.
The IOC’s periodic reform packages — reduced bidding costs, streamlined candidate processes — are explicitly rejected by the movement as insufficient. As Talbot’s analysis shows, activists point to the award of the 2022 Beijing Winter Games despite China’s record of displacing 1.5 million people for the 2008 Summer Games as evidence that reform promises do not constrain IOC behaviour in practice.
The “NOlympics Anywhere” frame
The slogan itself is a deliberate rejection of reformist compromise. Where some critics seek a “better Olympics” — reduced costs, improved legacy planning, community benefit agreements — the movement holds that the Games cannot be meaningfully reformed as long as the IOC selects host cities under a process that systematically externalizes costs onto host communities while centralizing revenue. “NOlympics Anywhere” signals opposition not to any particular Games but to the mega-event hosting framework as such.
In October 2019, activists served a mock eviction notice to the IOC and LA2028 organizing committee, a tactic that deliberately mirrored the displacement notices served to residents in host cities — and echoed the language of housing movements globally.
Obstacles and possibilities
Talbot’s chapter also grapples honestly with the movement’s limitations. Sustaining transnational coordination is resource-intensive, and the cycle of Olympic hosting means that local urgency peaks and then recedes city by city. Building durable international infrastructure when each city’s crisis is time-limited is a central challenge.
The chapter concludes by assessing what structural transformation to the mega-event hosting framework might actually require — and whether the networks developed since 2019 represent a foundation capable of applying sustained pressure between Games cycles rather than only during them. With Los Angeles 2028 approaching and Brisbane 2032 already on the horizon, the question is increasingly urgent.
Source: Adam Talbot, “NOlympics Anywhere: Building a Transnational Anti-Olympic Movement,” in Mark Turner and Jan Andre Lee Ludvigsen (eds.), Sport, Activism, and Social Movements: International Perspectives (Routledge, 2026), pp. 8–21. DOI: 10.4324/9781003703969-2
