13. Sports, media, politics, and national identity.

Beck, Daniel ; Bosshart, Louis

The fact that the whole world is looking at a certain country or a city makes the organization of world championships or Olympic games very attractive. Several countries and political parties tried to show their power and achievements via television to millions of viewers. It all started in Berlin in 1936 when Leni Riefenstahl produced a great documentary called "Olympia" with the side effect of celebrating masculine beauty and the start of a new future.

Not only the ruling classes try to take profit from the worldwide focus on a given country or event. Opposing forces, too, try to create news-value to get the attention of the media: for example, in 1968, students on the Tlatelolco square in Mexico or the "Black Power" gesture of Tommie Smith and John Carlos in the stadium; in 1972, Palestinian terrorists in Munich; and in 1988, trade unionists and students in Seoul.

The close relationship between sports and politics is not only striking at Olympic Games or at similar big events. Several surveys showed that spectators often consider athletes as representatives of the social and political system of their country (see Riggs, Eastman, & Golobic, 1993; Rivenburgh, 1993). Therefore, success in sports seems to be good for the prestige of a country. It can also be useful for domestic politics, as it can strengthen the feeling of belonging together in a country or a region. Rooting for a team is a part of the process of putting down roots (see Bairner, 2001; Bromberger, 1995; Boyle, 1996). Success in sports can also distract from the problems of everyday life. These functions help to explain the large amount of money paid for sports development plans not only in former communist countries before 1989, but also in democratic countries even today. Good results at international sports events seem to be an important goal mainly in smaller countries.

There is a paradox here. The great interest of politics in sports is probably related to the fact that sports, after all, are apolitical. Sports games are a world of their own, with clear rules being valid everywhere in the world. The results and scores are measurable and verifiable. Under these conditions, a success in sports must be accepted worldwide as a great performance, regardless of the political and social system of the country the athlete comes from (Von Krockow, 1996, pp. 361-367).

For a long time, the relationship between sports and politics was not an important topic for sports journalists. When events in the world of sports became politically relevant, e.g., when the USA and the Soviet Union boycotted the Olympic Summer Games in the early 1980s, the comments were mostly written by political journalists and not by sports journalists. But during the 1980s and 1990s, an awareness of political background information related to sports has increased among sports journalists, probably because of better education and changing editorial policies.

But are sports really important for the image and the prestige of a nation? In fact, sports media influence the way people look at their own and other countries. The media focus on athletes starting for their own country, and they have spread the same cliches about other countries for ages: Germans are hard-working and ambitious, Italians are passionate, French are proud and also ambitious, Brits are tough and fair, Asians are quick and nimble. Applying such national stereotypes has several functions in sports reporting: It can be used to describe an event in a simplified way, to comment on it, or to raise certain expectations in a forthcoming event. The cliches reported in the media often correspond to the traditional cliches of the spectators and readers (see Wernecken, 2000; Riggs, Eastman, & Golobic, 1993; Rivenburgh, 1993). Since an important part of the news about certain countries consists of sports reporting (Putz, 1993), we should not underestimate the ways that sports media can stabilize such cliches. The importance of national stereotypes in sports reporting explains to a certain extent why success in sports can increase the prestige of a country, because in case of success, rather positive stereotypes are highlighted. Nevertheless, the media use national stereotypes and cliches in quite flexible ways: Sometimes "Brazilian style" soccer is also played by Germans.

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Daniel Beck and Louis Bosshart

University of Fribourg--Freiburg (Switzerland)

email: daniel.beck@unifr.ch; louis.bosshart@unifr.ch