Rick Burton, director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center in the Charles H. Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon:
It’s clear that the Olympics are the ultimate propaganda machine in the sense that if a country can produce a winner, they are globally recognized as being the best in the world in that particular sport. For example, the U.S. for track and field in the sprints, basketball, swimming; the Kenyans and Moroccans in distance running; the Norwegians in cross-country skiing; and the Chinese in diving. Countries use the platform of the Olympics to drive awareness of their country and patriotic pride. The new head of the United States Olympic Committee indicated that he was going to cut funding for sports that didn’t have a legitimate chance of winning medals. He announced when he took over that there were as many as maybe 20 national governing bodies that could potentially expect to have their budgets cut because of the unlikelihood of them winning medals.
We understand sport today as being a business opportunity, whether we’re talking about pro sports or Olympic sports or global sports like the World Cup. We look not only at the athletic performance, but also at the business performance. And some of that is because sport is really the last unscripted drama that exists within our culture. We don’t know what the outcome will be, but when we have an outcome, it will produce a winner, it will produce a champion. And companies like to be associated with winners, because they hope that the consumer will translate -- “Oh, IBM is involved with the Olympics, the Olympics creates winners, IBM must be a winner.” Or, “Nike sponsors, or is endorsed by, Marion Jones, or Michael Johnson, they’re the fastest humans in the world or something, so therefore Nike must make great shoes.”
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Toby Miller, professor of cultural policy and cultural studies at New York University and the author of SportSex, forthcoming from Temple University Press:
The modern Olympics started in 1896, after France was defeated in the Franco-Prussian War and were specifically an attempt to restore French manhood. This was a nationalistic, chauvinistic enterprise. Later, after the Soviet Union entered the Olympics in 1952, the emphasis became on the national medal count -- that’s a Cold War artifact. So there is a tie between the Olympics and nationalism, war, and masculinity.
Yet the Olympic ethos has always been a utopian one as well, a dream of youth and cross-gender and cross-racial themes. This is the contradiction at the heart of the Olympics: You can only enter by being a member of a national team, but there’s also the goal of internationalism and fellowship. And at the heart of the old nationalism is warfare and masculinity. Running across both of these things now is commodification: Athletes are paid, they endorse products.
I have been fascinated by the change in the television coverage of the Olympics which we first saw in Atlanta, from statistics to storytelling. This shift is all about drawing the female viewer. Instead of baseball-and-football-style statistics, like how many yards were rushed, you have an emphasis on the person’s life background.
What this meant was that you would learn about the American who came in 18th in some match because her grandmother had Alzheimer’s. You wouldn’t even hear about the guy in third place who committed the crime of being from another country. It was all about the athlete’s interior feelings. This is celebrity culture, but it is also a kind of feminized culture, stereotyped of course by male TV executives. I think it’s really rather refreshing in terms of television. Why do we need to be fixated on how fast someone was?
Also, the sexuality of the male athlete is played up. When you see Carl Lewis, who is in my opinion the greatest athlete ever, featured in an advertisement wearing pumps, the athlete’s sexuality becomes explicit. And it’s done to draw the straight female viewer, as well as the gay male viewer, not that the television people would ever admit that.
It’s the networks’ dirty little secret. ESPN is still appealing to the white guy and the black guy, but when it comes to the networks, they can’t afford to act like that anymore.
This is controversial and complicated, but I think it has its positive side. Men are things to be looked at, like women have been for centuries. Now straight women’s desire and gay men’s desire, so often coded as not important, are being paid attention to. There’s a certain pleasure to be gained by taking back what was the straight male province.
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Judith Halberstam, professor of literature at the University of California at San Diego and author of Female Masculinity (Duke University Press, 1998):
It’s interesting the way women are being used in some of the publicity for the Olympics as the people who will articulate nationalism. It’s true of the softball team, too, and Dot Richardson, who was the highlighted person the last time around. She was both the person who was full of patriotism, and at the same time was the one who had to dispel the idea that the softball team was the lesbian team. She should be saying, Why do people think that softball is a lesbian sport? Well, because lesbian bars tend to organize and field softball teams. It’s worth just saying: Some of us are lesbians, some of us are not. But instead, I think precisely because she felt that she represented the nation, she also needed to represent a squeaky clean heterosexuality and make sure that people thought that that was what the team was about.
Some young girls will not go into sports that they’re very able at because they will be afraid of being called lesbians, and then other young girls who are lesbians will not go into sports for fear of confirming that they’re lesbians. It will continue to be a bugbear, and then there will be new standards for feminine presentation that will force very masculine women out of the sports.
In competitions like weightlifting, there’s just no way around it. In women’s soccer, if you looked at, for example, the Brazilian team versus the American team, the Brazilian team was clearly full of lesbians and had many, many women playing with extremely short hair, such that if you glanced at them, you wouldn’t have been able to tell at first glance whether it was a male or a female player on the field. Now the women’s team is so anxious to keep those ponytails, for display, so it’s all very well for Brandi Chastain to have a very muscular upper body, but she’s not shaving her head anytime soon. The fear of the charge of lesbianism against both straight women and lesbian women alters the look of the game, it alters the membership of teams, it alters the way people play, to be honest.
As body types change to accommodate rising expectations in the sport, then the ideals of female beauty have to be tweaked to make sure that muscularity now signifies heterosexuality, not lesbianism. Ten years ago I think if you had seen some of these muscular bodies, the assumption would have been, as it was with Martina Navratilova, that this is a lesbian. And now people have to think twice about that. And I think that campaign has been successful. Whereas in a way, it would be better if people had to come out as heterosexuals, given the fact that it’s a lesbian body ideal that has been adopted.
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Mark Dyreson, an assistant professor of kinesiology and history in the College of Health and Human Development at Pennsylvania State University, and author of Making the American Team: Sport, Culture, and the Olympic Experience (University of Illinois Press, 1998):
If you took a look at the Olympic Games at the beginning of the 20th century, the athletes on the American team were Irish-Americans. There was a lot of rhetoric about Anglo-Saxons versus people of Irish descent, ... and you hear some of the same rhetoric, the same kind of scientific racism, about race relations and how there might be genetic differences. What we’re seeing is the people at the bottom of American society with limited economic opportunities, new immigrant groups, are the ones historically that have found outlets in sports. And the genetic differences just don’t seem to wash to me.
The new sports they’re adding are really interesting because they tend to be sports that are right now dominated by North American and European, even Latin American, affluent cultures. Although they’re colorblind on one level, they’re the sports of the affluent middle class: mountain biking, beach volleyball. These are California sports. We’re seeing the Californiazation of the Olympic Games.
As this myth continues that blacks are somehow genetically superior, young white athletes are simply adopting these attitudes and dropping out of trying to compete in football and basketball and track and field and more traditional sports, and they’re migrating to these California techno sports.
Obviously East Africans dominate distance running, especially Kenyans, but if you really take a look at it, it’s not just East Africans, these people don’t all look alike. It’s Ethiopians, Moroccans; the skin-color differences are manifestly different, but to North American, European audiences, they’re just all black. And so, once again, commentators tend to argue, it’s got to be genetic, especially with the Kenyans. But people have very little understanding of how important distance running is in Kenyan society, that it’s the highest form of achievement in Kenyan society; it’s their perception that this is the only way they can make money on the world stage and go back and buy a little farm in Kenya. They’ve got 7-year-old kids that run 20, 30 kilometers a day. So they’re training from early ages. But we ignore all that and say it’s got to be genetic.
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