Page 193 - Sport Culture and the Media

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disembodied act: it generally involves one body in a state of excitement
watching others performing in extremis. The viewing body is, nonetheless, also
disciplined. It has to consent to being exposed at a specified time to the images
of the sporting event provided on screen. This freedom–constraint dialectic
is now played out in more complex ways as the viewing contexts of sports
television have diversified.
The conventional binary stadium–home classification of the sports spectating
experience has become increasingly unsatisfactory as presentational techniques
of sport have changed and more is known of the sociality of spectatorship.
Watching on screen rather than at the stadium has tended to be regarded as an
inferior, inauthentic experiential context for sport, but spectators conditioned
to expect the full panoply of televisual devices (close-ups, multiple, multi-angle
slow-motion replays, ‘post-match’ interviews, and the like) now demand the
comforts of the domestic TV hearth alongside the special experience of ‘being
there’ in real space and time (Eckersley and Benton 2002). This is an intriguing
reversal, whereby the place-based events that were once broadcast to dispersed
homes are now also serviced by the same media technologies to prevent paying
spectators from wishing they were getting a better, cheaper view at home.
Watching the crowd watching major sports events, there is constant recourse to
large screens for replays and close-ups of the action, sometimes to the conster-
nation of officials when the legitimacy of their rulings is called into question.
The after-action interviews with sportspeople, designed initially for the TV
audience, are now amplified for those in the stadium. For spectators in the
cheapest seats with distant and/or obscured views of the field of play, there is
considerable dependency on the television images provided. During the Sydney
2000 Olympics, for example, I attended what has become known as the
‘The Cathy Freeman Final’, when the Aboriginal runner, who had also lit the
Olympic cauldron during the Opening Ceremony, won a much-anticipated
400 metres final. The event was given special significance following the intense
discussion of the impact that a Freeman victory might have on the fraught issue
of reconciliation between White Australia and its Indigenous people (Hanna
1999; Lenskyj 2000). From my seat high in a stand, Freeman was only a tiny,
insectoid figure with the naked eye, requiring more time to be spent watching
Freeman on than off screen. At the same time, it was possible to give attention
to several simultaneous performances in sports like discus, pole vault and triple
jump, whereas for living-room viewers producers tighten the frame and con-
centrate the action. Nonetheless, being able to access directly the unique, scarce
resource of stadium attendance, and its intense, vibrant atmosphere, created a
collective history-laden atmosphere impossible to replicate in the domestic
environment (Rowe 2000a). The cultural capital generated by ‘being there’ is
still, then, considerable in sport, despite the hybrid, mediatized character of