Page 144 - Sport Culture and the Media

TAKING US THROUGH IT || 125

‘signing them up’ as on the same ‘team’. This well-established theoretical
notion of ‘interpellation’ – what Althusser (1971) calls ‘hailing’ subjects in
much the same way as people in the street automatically turn around when
someone calls out ‘Hey, you!’ (appropriately here we might add the line from
the Madness song One Step Beyond, ‘Don’t watch dat! Watch dis!’) – is more
than a matter of technical communication. It is also a question of ideology. If
media sports texts have the power to unite, temporarily or in the long term,
symbolically or materially, disparate audiences into relatively coherent groups
of patriots or consumers, then they are potentially deliverable, as Golding and
Murdock (1991: 17) noted in Chapter 3, to those who wish to ‘sustain and
support prevailing relations of domination’. For example, the patriotic fervour
generated by Argentina’s winning of the soccer World Cup in 1978 (at least
temporarily) assisted the fortunes of the oppressive military junta whose
slogan was ‘25 Million Argentinians Will Play in the World Cup’ (quoted in
Kuper 1994: 174). From the mouths of sports commentators can come social
ideologies in the guise of innocently hysterical descriptions of play.

Ideologies and Olympic extravaganzas

Live sports broadcasts (over which, of course, commentators exert only partial
control; see Chapter 6) do not have to be rampantly xenophobic to be the
bearers of ideology. Gordon and Sibson (1998), for example, note how the
absence of commentary on some of the smaller and more marginal national
teams during the television broadcast of the opening ceremony of the 1996
Atlanta Summer Olympics had the effect of further marginalizing those
nations. Tomlinson (1996), similarly, in his analysis of the commentary at
Olympic opening ceremonies, argues that at the 1984 Los Angeles Summer
Olympics, the aforementioned (and much lampooned) BBC commentator
David Coleman’s:
welcome to the Coliseum mixed history, myth and politics: ‘in the sun-
shine of this Californian afternoon, ancient Greek rites, Hollywood
fantasy and the reality of life in 1984 will find common ground. . .’
(Transcription from BBC broadcast). There were more nations and more
competitors than ever before at LA (despite Soviet bloc boycotts), wel-
comed by a showbiz style of ‘pure Hollywood extravaganza on a gigantic
scale’, as Coleman put it. ‘The show must go on’.
(Tomlinson 1996: 590)
In hosting on behalf of a national television audience a ceremony which,
during the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics, Coleman described as being