ABSTRACT
The idea that representative sport acts as a public location for national identity is one with a long history and a powerful present. ‘The nation’ has been formally enshrined in sport, through the use of flags and anthems in ceremonial aspects, and through the widespread use of national colours in sports clothes. A national team can, in media and popular discourse, take on the guise of the nation itself. When we say, for example, that ‘Great Britain always underachieves in the Olympic Games’, we consensually cut out the qualifying reference to tiny numbers of sportsmen and women practising specific sports, and assume a link between nation and team: sport provides ‘the metonym whereby the nation is presented as a single sentient being’. 1
