Every Tuesday, The Duty offers a space to the artisans of a periodical. This week, we offer you a text published in The Disadvantageno 97 (summer 2024).
Sport has become, over the last hundred years, one of our greatest forms of entertainment. It therefore leads us to approach it in the same way as any aesthetic production, so that we can interpret it, analyze it, and criticize it.
A spectacle, sporting activity was barely one at the beginning of the 20th century.e century. Pierre de Coubertin — the architect of the revival of the Olympic Games at the turn of the century — saw it as a substitute for military combat, a demonstration of virility and, in the face of a seasoned Germany, a particular way of putting the French into training, rather than an aesthetic display. From one Olympics to the next, the revivals organized in Athens, Paris or London, for example, barely provided stands for the curious.
The sporting performance had meaning in itself, without needing to be seen. It was in the 1930s that the Games, and in particular their opening and closing ceremonies, were offered to the gaze of a hundred thousand spectators crammed into large stadiums. They did so timidly in Amsterdam at the end of the 1920s, but later ostentatiously in Los Angeles and lavishly in Berlin thanks to the powerful propaganda apparatus of the Nazi regime. We inherit it.
We can say of this show that it has largely followed the four major media modes of its hundred years: theater, cinema, television and digital. But we have not learned to read it according to how it integrates in turn with three of these major forms of mediatization in its history.
When we sit in the stands of a stadium, or watch the broadcast of its clashes on television, or consume a fragment of it online, what are we looking at, what are we contemplating, what are we being told?
Ideological substrate
Sport actually allows you to say and support anything. This is why an important semiologist and novelist, Umberto Eco, abhorred it. For him, sport is the source of an exponentially neurotic industry of chatter.
To the gratuitous act of asking who of two people can throw the pebble the farthest into the water is added a statistical, then encyclopedic, imperative, until people are assigned to paraphrase the competitions, this verbiage being the object of redundancy in the cottages, until radios welcome on the airwaves the domestic palaver and televisions imitate its device starting from the same commentators of the beginning, […] this inflation in a loop reproducing itself on competing media channels, until it saturates the common space.
In this management of sports speech, the prerogative of media bodies belonging depending on the era to States or to large capital holders, proposals strongly imbued with ideology do not fail to graft themselves onto the silent, but how convenient, support of the sports scene.
Thus, in turn, sport has served as a framework for nationalisms as well as regionalisms, for phallocracy coupled with misogyny, then it has become a diplomatic card.
In a transversal way, it has also been closely associated with the war. The national anthems sung there, mobilizing as such the military aesthetic […] make sport the closest metaphor to military imagery.
Capitalism
We have also embraced sport as the standard-bearer of capitalism. It remains so. Athletes present themselves as agents of a liberal market reserved for the powerful, exemplifying its rules for the common man. Team budgets are better known today than those of states; and performance providers are evaluated according to the salary they were able to obtain in the game of supply and demand.
The coach spouts theories on a daily basis managementIn endless metaphors, big business never stops associating itself with these winners of the sports scene, presenting itself as champion in another theater of competition, the one that profits precisely from the sporting spectacle.
But sport can also, from another angle, offer itself as a vehicle for minority causes. Diego Maradona made his soccer team in Naples, Italy, an emblem of the resistant left. Black Americans at the Mexico Olympics recalled the importance of civil rights, and today women who practice boxing, football (soccer) or hockey at elite levels exemplify the feminist struggle.
The sporting demonstration thus becomes the elementary support for so many discursive claims. It does not resist any recuperation, lends itself to all discourses and presents itself as a bank of metaphors for any contingent situation.
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