Page 227 - Sport Culture and the Media

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motor cycle, car and yacht races, and even for a Japanese climbing expedition
on Mount Everest (Kennedy 2000: 33, 36). Quokkasports’ commitment to
sporting interactivity involved wiring competitors for words and pictures and,
in the case of a round-the-world yacht race, allowed visitors to chart the
progress of the craft and even to compete against them in a virtual race. The
mountaineers’ physiological data like heart rates were relayed alongside
meteorological conditions in pursuit of what co-founder John Bertrand called
‘“Immersive coverage. Many other sites do what we call horizontal coverage
but we go for total immersion so you get the inner story”’ (Kennedy 2000: 33,
36). The inner story of sport, however, was subsumed by the outer story of
media economics, and by the northern spring of 2001 Quokkasports had laid
off most of its staff and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, a victim of
‘an online advertising drought and investor apathy’ (Mariano and Olsen 2001).
In this fate Quokkasports was not alone, with the sports sites Broadband
Sports and Rivals.com closing, and CBS Sportsline at that time sacking sixty
staff (Mariano and Olsen 2001). The naive belief that the cybereconomy is
‘weightless’ proved to be wishful thinking, as operations like Quokkasports,
despite their innovative, interactive melding of television and the Internet in
unlikely media sports like ocean-going yacht racing, went down with all hands,
as did many other Internet sports companies like Sportal, which was bought in
2001 by UKBetting for just £2 (Gibson 2002c). Sports.com, the sports site sup-
plying many other general sites with information and images, went into
administration at just the moment that it was expected to flourish – the first day
of the 2002 Korea/Japan World Cup. In analysing new media sport technologies,
therefore, it is important not to become immersed in the conceptual environ-
ment that it creates, the intellectual equivalent of virtual reality where there are
no reference points beyond the world created by helmet and gloves. The
achievements and possibilities of media sport beyond broadcasting and print
require sceptical appraisal. The continuing health of mega-media sports events
like the World Cup and the Olympics has been clearly demonstrated in this
book. If the post-broadcast era is yet to arrive, there are signs that new pro-
ducer–text–consumer relations are emerging and so re-drawing various features
of the media sport landscape.
Change to the organization and experience of media sport takes a variety of
forms. It may involve new television devices or gadgets designed to enhance
viewer information and pleasure, such as the adaptations of computer-game
technology that create virtual representations of the trajectories of penalty
kicks in rugby union (‘AXA Angle’) and the movement of the ball in cricket,
tennis and baseball (‘Hawk-Eye’). ‘Tagging’, the attachment of transmitters to
athletes and even animals like horses and dogs, can produce 360-degree, three-
dimensional models of sports contests (Timms 2002). There is a danger,