Sigma UK launches Olympics-themed photo competition

"Olympics-themed" and the general idea of Spirit of the Games can mean anything sporty relevant to the games played, or even something to do with crowds/fans during the Olympics.

And besides, the website has a wimpy little disclaimer:

"Despite wanting to feature images taken of the Games themselves, LOCOG have placed restrictions on amateur and professional photographers alike. Therefore, we are inviting you to submit pictures showing the people, the build-up and the atmosphere from outside the arenas together with local sporting events inspired by the Games. Please ensure your submitted images do not contravene the terms and conditions of your ticket."

Ceasefire Magazine, The Olympics & Social Cleansing
http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/olympics-opportunity-cleanse-city/

"But the real gains for the rich can be witnessed in the long-term implications, once the crowds have gone home. Contrary to popular belief, the devastation inflicted on the poorest and historically marginalised communities is not simply an adverse side-effect, but goes to the very essence of why cities battle to host the Games.

...

The Olympics have always been utilised as a means to pursue what David Harvey calls ‘accumulation by dispossession,’ from visible policies of forced evictions to veiled ones such as gentrification. This violent process is intimately connected to reconfiguring the landscape for capital accumulation and, indeed, is a prime motivation for the very purpose of the Olympics itself.

Can we show images of the 2 Hr delay on the A40 because they'd closed off a lane at Hanger Lane to reduce the traffic on the North Circular?

Jim

The Games are not simply hosted to ‘clean up’ the city, but to fundamentally reconfigure it, to ‘cleanse’ it of its poor and undesirable; to not only make way for a city by and for the rich, but to expand the terrain of profitable activity.

...

In 2007, the UN-funded Centre for Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) released a report detailing the effects of the Olympics between 1988 and 2008. It concluded that the Olympic games, having evicted more then two million people in the past twenty years, are one of the top causes of displacement and real-estate inflation in the world.

As with previous host cities, the displacement of residents is not limited to direct government policy. In some East London boroughs landlords have begun evicting tenants in places where rents are fetching fifteen times their standard rates, flats are now being advertised as “Olympic lets” and imposing hefty “penalty” clauses for tenants who refuse to leave.

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The story in each city remains almost identical. Once selected, a city expends vast amounts of public resource to begin a program of forced displacement, rental speculation, urban renewal projects, demolition of public housing and gentrification. In fact, if there is one thread that runs through almost every Olympic event it is that the poor of each Games subsidise their own violent dispossession.

Any reading of Olympic history reveals the true motives of each host city. It is the necessity to shock, to fast track the dispossession of the poor and marginalised as part of the larger machinations of capital accumulation. The architects of this plan need a spectacular show; a hegemonic device to reconfigure the rights, spatial relations and self-determination of the city’s working class, to reconstitute for whom and for what purpose the city exists. Unlike any other event, the Olympics provide just that kind of opportunity."

A great video skit might be based on the driver who lost his way from Heathrow to London and wandered for hours, at the mercy of a faulty GPS, as a busload of Olympic athletes lost control of their bladders. Title: "The Bussed Day of My Life." Too bad Peter Sellers is no longer around to play the role.