Page 36 - Sport Culture and the Media

UNDERSTANDING SPORT AND MEDIA || 17

Committee (IOC), Juan Antonio Samaranch (strongly backed by Michael
Knight, the New South Wales minister responsible for the 2000 Summer
Olympics in Sydney, Australia), called on all countries to observe an ‘Olympic
truce’, just as US-led forces massed for a threatened military strike against Iraq.
No such call was made by the IOC as troops and planes were again poised to
invade Iraq in a quest for ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and ‘regime change’ in
2003, which was not an Olympic year. The motives of the Olympic truce were,
however, more pragmatic than moral. During the ancient Olympics, runners
were sent out, torch in hand, requesting safe passage through areas troubled by
military strife to enable the athletes to reach Elis to compete in the Ancient
Games (Hill 1992: 7–8). The strong moral impulse (much degraded, as I shall
later discuss) behind the modern Olympics, which were first staged in Athens
in 1896 near the Gods’ home on Mount Olympus, was, then, less a legacy of the
ancient Greeks than the product of a model of competition influenced by the
English, adapted by the French, exported to the world and, in 2004, re-imported
to Greece.

Profitable play

If there was a powerful morally and physically improving element fostering the
development of organized sport in nineteenth-century Britain, there was a less
edifying, baser force at work also – capital and profit. Importantly, the com-
mercialization of sport and the commodification of athletes (transformed
from casual ‘players’ into sportsworkers selling their athletic labour power as
‘products’ bought and sold on the sport market) opened up a deep schism
within the institutional ideology of sport itself. For lovers of sport like de
Coubertin and Arnold, being an amateur (derived directly from the French
word for lover) was to adhere to higher values of selfless devotion to the sport,
fellow team members and competitors. Indeed, the ethos of sport they were
promoting explicitly opposed the ‘unworthy’ practice of ‘playing for pay’ or of
constructing entire sports (like prize fighting) around gambling and money-
making. Attitudes to the business and work possibilities of sport were clearly
marked by social class at both ends of the hierarchy. For those who had
inherited wealth (especially through land ownership), there was no material
need to earn money from sport, but for the emergent entrepreneurial capitalist
class who accumulated wealth by making and selling goods and services, and
for the members of the working class who had no means of support other than
their own labour power, professionalized sport held many attractions. Thus,
while ‘upper-crust’ sports like rugby split into two codes in England in 1895
(and in Australia in 1907) over the issue of player payment and compensation