THE SCALE OF THE MOMENT.

There is a number that clarifies everything. When the Olympic Games Paris 2024 concluded in August of that year, the International Olympic Committee reported that around five billion people — approximately 84 per cent of the potential global audience — had followed the Games in some form. According to the IOC’s own research, conducted independently by Nielsen and Publicis Sport & Entertainment, those viewers consumed more than 28.7 billion hours of footage across broadcast and digital platforms. Every viewer watched, on average, nine hours of coverage. The social media dimension was more staggering still: an estimated 412 billion engagements from 270 million posts across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube — a 290 per cent increase on the Tokyo edition.

These numbers belong to Paris. They describe what the world does when the Olympic flame is lit. By 2032, that flame belongs to Queensland.

The 2032 Summer Olympics, officially the Games of the XXXV Olympiad and also known as Brisbane 2032, is a planned international multi-sport event scheduled to take place from 23 July to 8 August 2032 in Brisbane, Australia, with venues across the various regions of Queensland. The Paralympic Games follow shortly after, running from 24 August to 5 September. For approximately ten weeks — encompassing the lead-up, the competitions, and the ceremonies — Queensland will occupy a position in the global imagination that no amount of tourism advertising budget could buy, and that no state government could engineer through any other means. The question worth sitting with, well before the opening ceremony, is not whether billions of people will look at Queensland. That is settled. The question is what they will see, what sense of place they will carry with them when they return home, and what — if anything — of Queensland’s identity will remain in the global mind a decade after the closing ceremony.

A GAMES UNLIKE THOSE BEFORE IT.

Having been awarded the hosting rights 11 years and 2 days in advance, this is the most time a host city has had in planning and organizing an Olympic Games. That extended runway is unusual in the modern Olympic era, and it shifts the calculus of identity-building substantially. Most host cities have spent the final five years before the Games in a state of logistical compression — building, retrofitting, negotiating, worrying. Queensland has the luxury, and the corresponding responsibility, of using the years before the world arrives to determine, with some deliberation, exactly who it wants to be when the world is watching.

Unlike previous Olympics, the Brisbane Games will stretch well beyond one city, with events set to unfold in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast, and regional centres like Cairns and Townsville. More than 16,000 athletes and officials are expected to take part in 50 sports across 11 cities. This distributed geography is not simply an operational detail. It is a statement of identity. The Games will not be a Brisbane event with a Queensland backdrop. They will be a Queensland event — one in which Rockhampton, Toowoomba, Townsville, Cairns, Maroochydore and the Gold Coast are all, in meaningful ways, presented to the world. The 2032 Delivery Plan turns regional Queensland cities into Olympic and Paralympic cities through generational infrastructure. For a visitor flying into the Sunshine Coast to watch mountain bike racing, or arriving in Cairns for football preliminaries, Queensland is not an abstraction. It is a lived geography — warm, vast, and particular.

The Games will use a mix of new, renovated, and expanded venues across Brisbane, Gold Coast, and the Sunshine Coast, Cairns, and Townsville, Queensland. Each of those places carries its own texture. The Gold Coast’s world-famous beaches and its compressed urban strip of Surfers Paradise. The Sunshine Coast’s slower rhythm, its hinterland rainforests meeting the sea. Cairns and its position as gateway to both the reef and the rainforest. Brisbane itself: a river city that has spent the past two decades recasting its own character, insisting on being taken seriously as a cultural capital. The Games do not simply transmit a single postcard image of Queensland to the world. They transmit a multiplicity — a state that is enormous, varied, ancient, and genuinely difficult to reduce to a slogan.

WHAT THE VISITORS CARRY WITH THEM.

The phrase “billions of visitors” requires some unpacking. The overwhelming majority of those who encounter Queensland through Brisbane 2032 will never set foot in the state. They will watch on screens — on television, on streaming services, on the short-form video platforms that now mediate most of the world’s relationship with live sport. For those billions, Queensland is an image, a set of impressions, a concatenation of broadcast moments: the ceremonies held in the new 63,000-seat stadium being built at Victoria Park, the swimming at the new aquatics centre at Spring Hill, beach volleyball played against a backdrop that could only be Queensland.

But there are also the visitors who arrive in person. With almost 10 million tickets set to go on sale for the Olympics and 3.4 million for the Paralympics, spectators will have the opportunity to experience the Games alongside the greatest sporting champions in a unique and unforgettable atmosphere. For those visitors — athletes, accredited media, officials, volunteers, and the millions who secure tickets — Queensland is not a broadcast image. It is an experience of place. They walk the streets of Brisbane, swim in the ocean at the Gold Coast, eat in restaurants, take public transport, encounter Queenslanders in the ordinary texture of civic life. What they absorb — consciously or not — is a sense of who this place is, what it values, how it treats its guests, and what relationship it has with its own history and its own land.

Olympic cities increasingly emphasise unique elements of place identity by presenting or reconfiguring cultural heritage to motivate travel before, during and after hosting. The scholarly literature on Olympic legacy is instructive here: consensus on the city’s identity and core values, between the city authorities and the general public, is one of the key factors in achieving the success of city branding, and mega-events are regarded as a valuable opportunity for broadcasting the identity and core values of the host city. That broadcasting only works, however, if the identity being projected is coherent, genuinely held, and deeply rooted. It cannot be confected in the months before an opening ceremony.

THE VISION AND ITS WEIGHT.

In December 2025, the Brisbane 2032 Organising Committee released its official Games vision. Brisbane 2032 revealed its official vision: “Believe Belong Become Brisbane 2032” and laid down the ambition which will drive the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Announced at a launch event in Brisbane, the vision outlines how the Games aim to inspire communities, strengthen national pride and deliver long-lasting benefits for Queensland and Australia, both on the road to 2032 and far beyond.

The three words carry specific meanings that the Organising Committee has articulated with some care. Believe signifies belief in the power of sport and the Australian spirit, which together unlock limitless potential, grit and heart to go further than ever imagined. Belong articulates a vision in which everyone is welcome at the Games, with every person celebrated, creating a playing field that is fair and fun. Become describes a moment of opportunity for Brisbane, Queensland and Australia, harnessing the magic of the Games to become stronger and move into an exciting new era.

The vision is the result of a broad engagement process led by Brisbane 2032, with more than 6,000 Australians contributing, from a range of ages, locations, genders, cultures and communities. That process of consultation matters beyond its symbolic value. A vision that emerges from genuine community engagement is more likely to be expressed authentically in the thousands of small interactions that constitute the visitor experience — the volunteer who explains where to go, the local who recommends a place to eat, the ceremony that chooses to foreground something true about the country rather than something designed for international legibility.

The vision commits to appreciating the rich history and vibrant modern culture of Australia — its heritage and contemporary achievements are to be celebrated and shared. In Queensland’s case, that history is layered and demanding. It includes the Country of the Turrbal and Jagera peoples on whose land Brisbane sits, the Kombumerri of the Gold Coast, the Kabi Kabi of the Sunshine Coast, and the many First Nations peoples across the vast regional footprint the Games will traverse. The Organising Committee has recognised it is their collective responsibility to ensure equality, recognition and advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples across all aspects of society and everyday life, including sport, and has committed to building a deeper connection with First Nations peoples through meaningful listening and authentic engagement. How that commitment is given visible expression in the ceremonies, the cultural program, and the design of public-facing identity will be one of the most closely watched dimensions of the Games.

THE IDENTITY THAT TRAVELS AND THE IDENTITY THAT REMAINS.

There is a useful distinction to be drawn between two kinds of identity legacy that emerge from a Games. The first is the image that travels outward — what the world carries home about Queensland. The second is the identity that deepens within the state itself, the sense of civic self-understanding that a community can only acquire by seeing itself reflected in a global moment.

On the outward-travelling image, the scholarly record suggests that the most durable impressions are formed not by official branding but by the quality of the place itself. The Barcelona model shows how a city can leverage its image, based on the Olympic Games, to become more familiar to millions of potential tourists. Barcelona’s legacy was durable partly because the city it presented was real: the waterfront genuinely transformed, the urban fabric genuinely improved, the culture genuinely on display. The 2000 Sydney Games have been celebrated by many pundits as the best-organised Olympics in modern history, with a legacy of an improved environment, useful new transportation, real-estate development, and world-class infrastructure. Sydney became, in the global imagination, a particular kind of city — open, coastal, confident — and that image proved sticky across subsequent decades of tourism. Queensland has the raw material to produce a comparable consolidation of global image, and it has something Sydney could not offer in 2000: the distributed geography of a state rather than a single city.

When the television broadcasts cut from an athletics final in Brisbane to football in Cairns to beach volleyball on the Gold Coast to mountain biking on the Sunshine Coast, something unusual happens. The world is not simply shown a city. It is shown a region — diverse in landscape, climate, and character, but coherent in some essential way. The great rivers and reefs and mountains that define Queensland’s natural geography become a backdrop not just to the competitions but to the identity of the people competing and watching. Hosting the Brisbane 2032 Olympic Games is projected to deliver more than $8 billion in economic uplift to Queensland. But the economic accounting, useful as it is, can obscure what is more difficult to quantify: the value of the world simply knowing Queensland more fully than it did before.

On the inward-deepening identity — the civic self-understanding that accumulates within Queensland itself — the Games represent a singular invitation. As Brisbane 2032 comes into view, discussions around the Games’ long-term legacy are intensifying; this legacy refers to the long-term impact that the event will have on the host city and country, with a well-run Brisbane Olympic Games having the opportunity to provide lasting social, economic, and environmental benefits to the future of Australian sport. But beyond sport, there is the less-quantifiable transformation that happens when a community sees itself at the centre of the world’s attention and rises to that occasion with coherence and grace. The volunteers who give weeks of their lives to the Games, the schoolchildren who participate in the cultural programs, the regional communities who host athletes and officials — all of them become, in some sense, co-authors of the Queensland identity that the world receives.

THE PROBLEM OF IMPERMANENCE.

The histories of previous Games are instructive precisely because they demonstrate that the identity benefit is not automatic. It requires active construction, and that construction must begin well before the world arrives. Even Sydney, which in 2000 hosted what Olympic Committee president Juan Antonio Samarach proclaimed the “best Games ever”, suffered a post-event hangover, with its Olympic Park struggling to find its identity and fulfil its potential in the years that followed. The physical infrastructure can outlast its meaning. Stadiums can stand for decades while the sense of civic occasion that animated them fades quickly.

The lesson from Sydney — and from Athens, and from others — is that identity legacy requires infrastructure that is not only physical but symbolic and institutional. The venues must have uses that sustain civic life after the Games. The cultural programs must have successors that keep their content alive. The names and narratives that the world associated with Queensland in 2032 must have anchors in Queensland’s ongoing life — not merely in the memory of a fortnight.

Elevate 2042 is Brisbane’s legacy strategy, setting out a vision for how the Olympic Games will benefit the host city and region for a decade after the Games’ conclusion. That ten-year frame is significant. It acknowledges that the identity work of the Games does not end with the closing ceremony — it must be actively maintained, extended, and renewed in the years that follow. The visitors who came to Queensland in 2032 are potential return visitors in 2035, 2038, 2042, provided that the Queensland they find on return is recognisably continuous with the Queensland they encountered at the Games.

The Brisbane 2032 Olympics are being positioned as a benchmark for environmentally sustainable mega-events, with the Games prioritising low-carbon transport, renewable energy, and minimal construction waste. Approximately 84% of venues will be existing or upgraded infrastructure, reducing the need for carbon-intensive new builds. That sustainability posture is itself an identity statement. It tells the world something specific about Queensland’s values in 2032 — that the state is not prepared to purchase its moment of global visibility at the cost of the natural environment that makes Queensland recognisable and worth visiting in the first place.

PERMANENCE AS A CIVIC COMMITMENT.

What, then, does it mean to build a Queensland identity capable of surviving the Games — of being carried home by billions of observers and remaining legible a decade after the closing ceremony?

It means beginning the work now, in the years before the world arrives, rather than in the weeks before the opening ceremony. Cities like Brisbane can be thought of and evaluated as brands, and understanding positive and negative sentiment, as well as examining the presence or absence of buzz, is essential in gaining insight into audience perceptions and potential implications for the city’s brand. The brand is not made in the broadcast — it is made in the years of accumulation that the broadcast then amplifies. Every decision taken now about how Queensland presents itself, what it names, what it values, how it organises its public-facing identity, is a decision about what the world will encounter in 2032.

The Sydney 2000 Olympic and Paralympic Games was about boosting the city’s international standing and raising its status as a world-class tourism destination. Brisbane should be working towards becoming the sports-technology centre of the universe, according to internationally renowned sports marketing academic Professor Rick Burton, speaking at the University of Queensland in 2025. That ambition — to be not merely a capable host but a genuinely distinctive one — requires Queensland to have a clear sense of what it is that makes it distinctive, and to have built the institutional infrastructure to present that distinctiveness coherently and permanently.

The digital dimension of this identity infrastructure has become more consequential with each successive Games. The Paris Games generated an estimated 412 billion social media engagements. By 2032, the digital landscape will have evolved further still — more platforms, more creators, more points of entry into what a place is and what it means. Every social media post tagged with a location in Queensland, every video of a competition or a ceremony or a street scene in Brisbane or Cairns or the Gold Coast, every digital address associated with the Games, contributes to an accumulated picture of Queensland that outlasts the fortnight of competition.

This is why the years before 2032 matter as much as the Games themselves. The identity that billions of visitors will take home is not assembled during the opening ceremony. It is assembled across the full arc of preparation — in the decisions made about how Queensland presents itself online, in the permanence or impermanence of the digital infrastructure built to anchor the Games, in the cultural choices made about what stories are told and which names are honoured. The Games will attract billions of viewers, millions of visitors, deliver generational economic and social benefits, and secure legacies for grassroots communities through to elite athletes, as the Organising Committee’s own language acknowledges. That scale of attention is not merely an opportunity for tourism promotion. It is a civic moment — perhaps the defining civic moment of this generation in Queensland.

WHAT REMAINS AFTER THE FLAME IS EXTINGUISHED.

The Olympic flame travels to Queensland in 2032 and departs shortly thereafter. What does not depart is the global impression that has been formed, the associations that have been built, the names and identities that have been etched into collective memory across dozens of countries and hundreds of millions of households. The question for Queensland — and it is a question that must be answered now, not in 2031 — is whether that impression will be deep and durable, or shallow and ephemeral.

The evidence from cities that have handled their Games well suggests that depth comes from authenticity: from showing the world something that is genuinely Queensland, rather than something assembled for global consumption. The reef and the rivers. The coast and the rainforest. The heat and the light that are specific to this latitude. The First Nations presence that is not a footnote but a foundation. The civic warmth that has long distinguished Queensland’s character in the eyes of those who know it well. These are not elements that require invention. They require acknowledgment and careful presentation.

"Mega-events are regarded as a valuable opportunity for broadcasting the identity and core values of the host city."

That observation, drawn from the peer-reviewed literature on city branding and Olympic legacy, contains both a promise and a condition. The opportunity is real. The broadcasting capacity of the modern Games is extraordinary. But the identity and core values that get broadcast must be present to be transmitted. They cannot be improvised at the moment of transmission.

Queensland is, in 2026, six years from the opening ceremony. From the 2021 selection of the city as the host for the 2032 Summer Olympics, Brisbane has 11 years to prepare for the Games. Within that preparation window, the most consequential work is not always the most visible. The stadiums and transport corridors are necessary and will be built. What is less certain — and far more important to the identity legacy of the Games — is whether Queensland uses this period to construct a coherent, permanent, and genuinely rooted sense of who it is: a sense of place capable of surviving the intensity of the world’s attention, of being carried home by billions of people in a form that endures long after the competition has concluded and the broadcast centres have been dismantled.

The identity Queensland builds now, in the years before the world arrives, is the identity the world will take with it when it leaves. That is the civic challenge — and the civic opportunity — that 2032 presents.