Garry Whannel

Understanding the Olympics

Timeline Introduction Part 1: The Olympic Games and London 1. London, the Olympics and the Road to 2012 2. The IOC and the Bidding Process 3. Television and the commercialisation of the Olympic Games Part 2: From Out of the Past 4. Reviving the Games 5. From Worlds Fairs to Mega-events Part 3: The Spectacle of Modernity - Towards a Postmodern World? 6. The Internationalist Spirit and National Contestation 7. The Politics and the Games 8. Festival, Spectacle, Carnival and Consumption 9. Level Playing Fields 10. The Olympic Games and Urban Development: Imagining and Engineering Cities and Sport Spectacles. Conclusion

Television and the Transformation of Sport

Sport played a significant part in the growth of television, especially during its emergence as a dominant global medium between 1960 and 1980. In turn, television, together with commercial sponsorship, transformed sport, bringing it significant new income and prompting changes in rules, presentation, and cultural form. Increasingly, from the 1970s, it was not the regular weekly sport that commanded the largest audiences but, rather, the occasional major events, such as the Olympic Games and football’s World Cup. In the past two decades, deregulation and digitalization have expanded the number of channels, but this fragmentation, combined with the growth of the Internet, has meant that the era in which shared domestic leisure was dominated by viewing of the major channels is closing. Yet, sport provides an exception, an instance when around the world millions share a live and unpredictable viewing experience.

Sport stars, narrativization and masculinities.

In the last ten years academic research has turned its attention to analyses of masculinity, and, increasingly, such analyses are examining the tensions within and between masculinities. The concept of a crisis in masculinity has become an element of public discourse. The macho-ization of male culture in the 1980s, and the emergence of new laddism in the 1990s could be seen as aspects of this supposed ‘crisis’. This paper examines these issues through analysis of the representation of sport stars and in particular the ways in which their stories are narrativized. It analyses the ways in which sporting excellence can be narrated in terms of maverick individualism. It suggests that events around the 1998 World Cup were framed in terms of tensions between the hedonism of the new lad lifestyle and the disciplined needs of national football success, and that in the process a disciplined masculinity was re-asserted as against dysfunctional new laddism.

The ‘caged torch procession’: celebrities, protesters and the 2008 Olympic torch relay in London, Paris and San Francisco

Along with the opening and closing ceremonies, one of the major non-sports events associated with the modern Olympic Games is the torch relay. Although initiated in 1936, the relay has been subject to relatively little academic scrutiny. The events of April 2008 however will have cast a long shadow on the practice. This essay focuses primarily on one week (6–13 April) in the press coverage of the 2008 torch relay as the flame made its way from London to Paris in Europe and then to San Francisco in the USA. It discusses the interpretations offered in the mediated coverage about the relay, the Olympic Movement, the host city and the locations where the relay was taking place, and critically analyses the role of agencies, both for and against the Olympics, that framed the ensuing debate.

Reflections on Communication and Sport On Mediatization and Cultural Analysis

In this essay, Garry Whannel reflects on why research on media and sport has often been disdained by traditional academia and liberal intelligentsia. The first section argues that mediated sports are an important constituent part of popular culture, making its discourses worthy of scholarly study. The second section considers how early studies of mediated sport set in the tradition of British cultural studies opened the door to a inquiry that has grown in importance in both critical sport and media studies. The central section focuses on the complexities of “sport analysis, snobbery, and anti-intellectualism.” Considered here is the early and continued resistance to the study of media and sport and its derogatory stigmatization as a “Mickey Mouse” subject even in the face of excellent scholarship that has developed around the cultural and political analysis of sport. The article closes with suggestions for future work and ways to change narrative constructions of the field.

Winning and losing respect: narratives of identity in sport films

This essay examines sport films in terms of respect, identity and individualism. It suggests that a common narrative structure in films featuring sport based stories involves the winning, or sometimes losing, of respect. Success in narrative terms is not so much associated with sporting victory as in winning the respect of others. Through these narrative structures, issues of identity are explored. In particular, the narratives trace the ways in which characters respond to challenges by changing. In this sense these films are rooted in an ideology of competitive individualism which is a distinct product of capitalism as it developed in the United States of America. So while women, Jews, Afro-Americans and British Asian girls all find fulfilment through the narrative journey of these films, it tends to be within the terms of the competitive individualist ideology. Only where the concept of respect and its association with sport performance is challenged or questioned do sport films tend to raise more profound questions about the individual in society.

The paradoxical character of live television sport in the twenty-first century.

The interacting social forces that have shaped the development of the electronic media constitute complex and contrary developments. Television technology, unlike that of the cinema, took a long time to grow from a technological possibility in the 1930s to maturation in the 1970s. Mega-events such as the Olympic Games and the World Cup have both a centripetal and a centrifugal character. They suck in global attention in a vortextual fashion, and yet the spectacle is not so much local and embedded as it is dispersed around the globe. Live sport, dispersed across platforms, is part of a bifurcation of social life—people are half present and embedded, half engaged in virtual interactivity. Technology has typically developed in two directions—producing the giant screens of public viewing spaces and also of the living room, and producing the miniaturization that enables live sport on mobiles, watches, and the Google Glass. Finally, media sport is ubiquitous yet is all but invisible to many others who simply filter it out.