Living Heritage and the Sports Museum: Athletes, Legacy and the Olympic Hall of Fame and Museum, Canada Olympic Park

Museums are sites of cultural production, although what kind of culture they produce, and to what end, has changed considerably in recent years. Many displays and exhibitions are now constructed in order to meet the specific economic and cultural agendas of their host organizations. Sports museums, in particular, utilize a variety of exhibition displays for numerous practical and pragmatic reasons, often to construct or espouse notions of legacy. This study examines the Olympic Hall of Fame and Museum at Canada Olympic Park in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. This museum uses a number of different display mechanisms in constructing legacy, including providing visitors with the opportunity to watch the training sessions of elite Olympic athletes as part of their museum visit, as well as the chance to ‘become’ athletes themselves through sport-simulation displays. Through these different types of displays, this museum positions its host site, Canada Olympic Park, as a current and relevant tourist attraction and integral sport training facility, rather than simply an artefact of a distant Olympic Games. What this museum reveals is that when legacy is a central output of heritage construction, the past – be it historical or otherwise – is only relevant in terms of its relation to the present and future.