York experts have got you covered for Paris Olympics

July. 26, 2024, TORONTO – While the Olympics are a show of international friendship and athletic excellence, they are also about politics and diplomacy, tourism, social change and spectacle, and sometimes even espionage.

“The Olympics has the potential to be such a positive force for good in the world,” says York University Faculty of Health Associate Professor Hernán Humaña, a three-time Olympic coach who teaches a course on the history of the Olympic Games and will be in Paris July 26 onward cheering on his daughter, Melissa Humana-Paredes. “Every Olympics strives to meet its ideals, and every Olympics falls short — but I am an optimist, I believe each Olympics gets better and better.”

Humaña and other York experts are available to give comment to media on everything from nationalism in sport and why the economic pressures on athletes are getting even worse, to branding and tourism opportunities, the evolution of women’s basketball in Canada and how large sporting events intersect with sex tourism and displacement of low-income people, and more.  

Hernán Humaña

Humaña, who helped Canada secure a bronze in the Atlanta ’96 games, teaches in the Department of Kinesiology and Health Science at York University. He was an early coach for his daughter, who along with her Canadian beach-volleyball partner and fellow York alumna Brandie Wilkerson, is currently ranked fourth in the world and is in Paris competing for a medal. Humaña played for the Chilean national volleyball team and came to Canada as a political refugee during the Pinochet years, a journey which he documented in his book Playing Under The Gun: An Athlete’s Tale of Survival in 1970s Chile. He is available from Paris to comment on the history of the Olympics and how political and social events intersect and affect the modern games from their inception in the late 1800s to now. Humaña can also offer interviews in Spanish.

Topics he can speak to include: 

• History of the Olympics
• Sport and nationalism
• Gender issues in sport 
• Compensation and treatment of athletes

Parissa Safai 

The Canada Soccer drone-spying controversy is, in part, a great example of how much more aggressive Canada has become on the international sport scene in pursuit of wins, says Parissa Safai, professor in the Faculty of Health and Chair of the School of Kinesiology and Health Science.

“In many ways, the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics marked a pronounced shift in Canada’s attitudes towards success on the Olympic stage and our high-performance sport system became even that much more intentional about ‘owning the podium’,” says Safai. “For an athlete, gold medal-winning performances demand not just an unconditional commitment to physical training and skill development, but presuppose disposable money and disposable time, as the financial support from governments is just not enough.”

Many athletes are highly reliant on their parents for financial support, and the costs of producing a gold-medal winning performance has gone up, adds Safai, putting more pressure on high-performance athletes, and making their finances even more precarious. Safai is an expert in the sociology of sport, health and social inequality. She is available for phone and video conference interviews and can speak to:

• Sports medicine and sports related pain and injury 
• Sport risk-taking
• Sport and social inequality and gender equity in sport 
• Barriers to physical activity in communities
• Sport policy and governance
  
  

Danielle Howard

In 2018, a U.S. conservative news commentator said that LeBron James should just “shut up and dribble,” after the NBA star gave his views about then-President Donald Trump in an ESPN podcast. 

Those comments inspired a documentary by the same name that explored the social and political influence of NBA players through the history of the league, which in turn was an inspiration for AMPD Assistant Professor Danielle Howard’s latest research at the intersection of race, sport and performance. 

“The documentary got me thinking, does dribbling have more to say about politics, about Black life, then we have initially given it credit for?” 

Howard is working on a book called Making Moves: Race, Basketball, and Embodied Resistance that spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries of basketball history. She examines America’s history of white supremacy and how comments like “shut up and dribble” reflect a continued dismissal of Black lives and experiences, images of the Black body on display through history from slave auctions to NBA drafts and how audience and media surveillance impacts movement. “The majority of bodies in the NBA are Black. So from a media standpoint, the majority of the media consumption we have of basketball is represented by Black bodies.”

She also looks at how Black athletes speak with their bodies, and how politics, history and social movements are embodied in athleticism, from the New York Renaissance basketball team to present times.

“Black performance in sport is not merely aesthetic, it has potential and purpose to be disruptive to the political and to ultimately incite change and liberation.” 

Howard is available to comment on: 

• Race, politics and sport
• Sport as performance, particularly basketball
• Theatre and spectacle in the opening and closing Games
• Aesthetics and virtuosity in Olympic sports such as gymnastics, diving, synchronized swimming and breaking 
  

Vijay Setlur

 “France is already the most visited country in the world, but hosting the Olympics would diversify the destination and its visitor economy,” says Vijay Setlur, a marketing instructor at York University’s Schulich School of Business specializing in sports marketing and tourism marketing. “People visit the country for its museums, galleries, architecture and culinary offerings, but Paris will now be able to attract more international sporting events to capitalize on the growing sport tourism segment and elevate its status as a sports city.”

Setlur attended and gave commentary at FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 and is also a consultant for Concacaf (Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football). Setlur is available to comment on:

• Canadian soccer drone scandal and how it might affect the perception of Canada Soccer and sponsorship activity
• Sponsorships and the Paris Olympic Games
• How the NFL and ICC are hoping to leverage flag football and cricket, making its debut at the LA28 Games, to engage younger consumers
• TV ratings and viewership of the Games
• Use of technology at the Olympics
  

Sarah Bay-Cheng 

“For me, sports is another kind of performance: It’s aesthetic, it’s time-based, there’s an audience,” says Professor Sarah Bay-Cheng, dean of the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design at York University and a former NCAA basketball player. “As the playwright Sarah Kane once said, the difference between theatre and a football (soccer) match is that you don’t know how the football match is going to end.”

Bay-Cheng’s research focuses on the intersection of performance and media, including how digital technologies create performance conditions in museums and other cultural heritage sites. In this capacity, she is co-curating a gallery exhibition for the Museum of Toronto on the history of basketball in Toronto that will open in the spring of 2025.

“In Toronto basketball didn’t follow a linear development. Different versions of the game emerged at different times and in different places. Part of the work of preparing the exhibition has been to dig into the history of basketball in Canada and what has made Toronto such an exceptional place for the sport. As a former player, I’ve been very interested in learning more about the history of women’s basketball in Canada as relation to, but also very distinctive from the history of the sport in the United States.”

Bay-Cheng is available to comment on the history of basketball in Canada, particularly the women’s game:

• The American and Canadian roots of the game
• How women’s basketball started among primarily white, upper-class women in the U.S., Ontario and eastern Canada, and why they were no match for a team from Western Canada that adopted a more aggressive style of play
• How Title IX in the U.S. was a game-changer for women’s basketball
• How both the men’s and women’s games have become more international, with training concentrated in NCAA schools
• Sports as mediated performance

Amanda De Lisio

During the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games, Faculty of Health Assistant Professor Amanda De Lisio  partnered with researchers in Rio de Janeiro to examine what happened with sex workers during the games.

“One of the narratives that follows the sport mega event is related to the involvement of human trafficking,” says De Lisio in the School of Kinesiology and Health Science. “We work with people who are often the target of these anti-trafficking strategies to find out what is actually happening on the ground, are they being trafficked or exploited in their labour? And how their patterns of labour and migration in the city may change as a result of the mega event.”

De Lisio is working with groups in Los Angeles, which will host the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the 2027 Super Bowl, and the 2028 Olympic Games to examine what is happening on the ground there ahead of the games. Her latest paper, published earlier this month, looks at the security apparatus of the Rio Olympics, and argues that “despite the enormous investment and facade of newly militarized host communities, insecurities remained, and ‘security’ as a practice failed to be guaranteed.” De Lisio is also available for interviews in Portuguese.                            

  She can comment on:

• Understanding sex work as labour in a vulnerable sector and how displacement brought on by mega-events affects sex workers and other communities
• Sport mega-event construction and the financialization of housing
• Local groups in Paris decrying Olympics-related displacement of low-income people
  

J-Rebel

A half century after the birth of Hip-Hop among mostly Black and Latino, working-class youth in the South Bronx, breaking makes its debut as an Olympic sport. For longtime breaker J-Rebel (Joseph Hersco) from the Supernaturalz Crew, who helped develop and co-taught a course on the art of breaking at York with AMPD dance professor Mary Fogarty, he’ll be watching the competition on Aug. 9 and 10 with a mix of emotions and criticisms. 

“There is a political side of Hip-Hop — it comes out of particular socio-economic conditions, right? I think a lot of that can easily get washed out, when the focus is around just who’s winning in the competition,” says J-Rebel, who lives and works in the Jane and Finch community in Toronto. “But those things are intertwined in breaking — the politics, the cultural aspects, race, class and gender.” 

J-Rebel, who teaches kids breaking and has travelled the world by competing in international breaking competitions comparable to the caliber we will see at the Olympics, picked up the practice himself decades ago with peers and in community centres in Jane and Finch, Lawrence Heights and Malvern where he grew up and lived. He says that while breaking is more accessible to the youth in his community — predominantly low-income and working-class — than a sport like hockey or football, there are still barriers to who might be able to compete at the highest level due to social inequalities that are still present in many communities in Toronto. 

“It’s not necessarily a predetermined thing because youth from these particular places have become resilient out of necessity, but your proximity to privilege and having resources is going to give you a better chance at developing your competencies.”  

J-Rebel is available to comment on: 

• Origins and connections of breaking to hip-hop; roots in New York and Black diasporic cultural expression 
• Why the Olympics need breaking and not the other way around
• Technical, cultural and social aspects of breaking 
• Ensuring access to breaking and sport in low-income and racialized communities. 
• History of breaking in Toronto 

Martin Breaugh

France was on shaky grounds ahead of the Olympics, politically speaking, but the ruling parties dodged a bullet in the snap election by blocking the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party from taking power, says Professor Martin Breaugh in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies and an expert in French politics.  

“The presence of RN ministers at the Olympics would have been an impossible situation to manage with the potential of athletes boycotting such ministers, as well as local officials and maybe even delegations from elsewhere, especially the former French colonies, doing the same,” he says. 

Breaugh is available for email, phone and teleconferencing videos and is currently on Central European Time six hours ahead of Toronto. He is also available for interviews in French and can speak on: 

• The political situation in France in the leadup to the Olympics
• How the handling of the Olympics will impact public perception of the government
• History of politics in France
  

Satinder K. Brar 

Despite France spending more than $1.5 billion in cleanup efforts to get it in good shape before the start of the Olympics, the Seine continues to experience problems with water pollution, with the men’s triathlon posted this week due to unacceptably high levels. Lassonde School of Engineering Professor Satinder K. Brar is an expert in environmental biotechnology and decontamination, with particular expertise in water. Brar is also available for interviews in French, Hindi and Punjabi, and can comment on: 

• Cleanup efforts of the Seine
• Waste water contamination and potential risks to athletes
• Other pollutants sometimes found in urban bodies of water

Lyndsay Hayhurst 

For 15 years, Faculty of Health Associate Professor Lyndsay Hayhurst has been collaborating with self-identified women and youth in Canada, Uganda and Nicaragua to investigate the role of sport for social justice and ‘development’. This includes examining cycling as a possible catalyst for achieving mobility justice and gender equity; investigating how community sport for development programs may create novel possibilities for feminist climate-justice activism; and addressing physical inactivity among marginalized youth and women (cis and trans) through the use of trauma-and violence-informed approaches.

“We’re arguing that these trauma-informed approaches can ultimately make sports safer and more equitable, and that certainly flies in the face of some of the approaches to coaching and sport that we sometimes see are taken up at the Olympics,” says Hayhurst, also the York Research Chair in Sport, Gender and Development & Digital Participatory Research. 

Hayhurst and collaborators just launched a short documentary film –Changing Gears  – and she is available to comment on:

• Sport and gender equity
• Gender-diverse youth and sport
• Trauma-and-violence-informed approaches to sport, recreation and leisure

• Sexual and gender-based violence prevention in/through sport for development
• Climate change initiatives and ‘greenwashing’ at the Paris Olympics
• Sport for development and peace initiatives and NGO activisms
• Community sport and recreation initiatives, especially cycling and soccer
  
  

Please check your inbox or online for updates to this roster. 

For a list of some of the York-affiliated athletes and medical team members participating in the Games, please see here.

About York University

York University is a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change, and prepare our students for success. York’s fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario’s Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. York’s campuses in Costa Rica and India offer students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future.

Media Contacts: Emina Gamulin, York University Media Relations and External Communications, 437-217-6362, egamulin@yorku.ca

About York University

York University is a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change, and prepare our students for success. York’s fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario’s Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. York’s campuses in Costa Rica and India offer students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future.

Media Contacts: Emina Gamulin, York University Media Relations and External Communications, 437-217-6362, egamulin@yorku.ca