The Sporting Gamble: Media Sport, Drama and Politics

Abstract

Sport is historically developed, institutionally organised, politically charged and culturally communicated. Sport is also about time and space and bodies. Media sport — configured as drama — routinely presents audiences with particular, persuasive ways of understanding these materialities, in ways that work over and consolidate social relations of power between genders, nationalities, ‘races’. We note some pre-Sydney 2000 media examples which make their own arguments about the Olympics, and then some of the varied media presentation and reportage of Sydney 2000 in order to consider this media event as part of ongoing gender, ‘race’ and national politics.