Page 232 - Sport Culture and the Media

AFTERWORD || 213

There are undoubted dangers in ‘mediacentricity’, in exaggerating the power
of the media over sport and over everything else that they touch (Blain 2003),
as well as of the centrality of sport itself. The author might be said to have a
certain vested interest in presenting an all-consuming picture of the wall-to-wall
world of sport. But everyone is connected in some way to the media sports
cultural complex – all those words and images spewing forth, all that money,
technology and personnel set to work to give us more. The conclusion to the
first edition of this book was written during the 1998 soccer World Cup Finals
in France alongside a cumulative audience of ‘an estimated 37 billion people
worldwide’ (Austin 1998: 4) and, like most of them, a long way from the action
on the pitch. This conclusion is being written five years later, sandwiched
between the 2002 Korea/Japan World Cup, the most watched event in the history
of television (as noted in Chapter 3), and the 2004 Athens Olympics in the
home of the Modern Games that will certainly seek to break that global TV
viewing record. The cultural power of media sport is undiminished and, more-
over, enhanced. In 1998, I pondered the sudden demonization of the sent-off
David Beckham (now ‘Posh Spite!’ according to the tabloids), whereas now he is
the much-worshipped subject of film, television and the press, he ‘reigns in
Spain’, and academics are trying to explain the once resistible rise of Posh’n-
’Becks. This is but one example of the speed and extent of change in the media
sports cultural complex. But five years ago there were rumours of a new Euro-
pean soccer Super League that would further blur the boundaries of national
cultures, and drugs scandals in athletics, swimming, rugby league, basketball
and cycling (the ‘Tour de Drugs!’). Here continuity rather than change can be
stressed. There are still attempts to establish a European Super League,
although a world club championship staged in Brazil in 2000 gave a glimpse of
a deracinated future, with England’s Manchester United withdrawing in that
season from its domestic FA Cup, the oldest continuous football competition in
the world. The spur, it seems, was one of sport’s enduring features – insti-
tutional politics – in this case England’s failed attempt to host the 2006 World
Cup (Sugden and Tomlinson 1999: 180–1). There have been many sports drug
scandals since, including one involving the leading Australian cricketer Shane
Warne, who had to leave his teammates behind in South Africa and Zimbabwe
during the 2003 World Cup of Cricket. Sometimes, then, the sheer, relentless
presence and force of media sport feels like the cultural counterpart of a tsu-
nami, and at others more closely resembles the predictable, warm flow of the
jacuzzi. The corruption scandal that gripped the International Olympic Com-
mittee in 1999 may have saddened some of the more terminally naive sports
romantics, but it provided fantastic quantities of front-page copy and ‘shock
horror’ lead stories. There have been more outrages to consume the media’s
interest since, including the judging of some events during the 2002 Salt Lake