ABSTRACT
In Australia, the distinctive national body, produced by a hostile and foreign environment, modified and improved in battle, tested against the imperial centre in sporting contest and cemented in a ‘love affair’ with the great outdoors has become central to an understanding of the nation. Whether it is the rugged outdoorsman or the bronzed lifesaver, Australian identity has been located largely within an understanding of nature, the natural body and the interaction between the two. Given Australia’s selfdeclared love for sport and its significance in the construction of national identity, it is no surprise that sport is similarly grounded in conceptions of nature and that the natural athletic body is idealised as the epitome of ‘Australianness’. Yet, the relationship between ‘nature’ and sport and their contribution to ‘Australianness’ is not reduced to corporeality alone. When Sydney was awarded the 2000 Olympic Games in 1993, its success was, in part, based on its commitment to an ‘environmentally friendly’, ‘athletes’ games’, an event that was unpolluted and unpolluting (McGeoch and Korporaal 1994). The ‘freedom to play’ in a healthy, natural environment formed the basis of efforts to ‘clean up’ not only the dioxin-contaminated Homebush Bay Olympic site, but also the wider Olympic movement through the removal of the corrupting influence of various tainted IOC members as well as other ‘scourges’ such as performance enhancing drugs (Lehmann 1999; Magnay 1999a). By removing these ‘snakes’ from the Olympic ‘Garden of Eden’, the unpolluted home/bush was, in turn, reproduced in assurances about the purity and naturalness of Australian bodies that occupied the site. By constructing the nation as ‘clean/sed’ and ‘natural’, Australian athletes were signified as rightful heirs to the utopian, psychosocial space of the home/bush. The extensive marketing of Sydney relied on images that presented
Australia as a wild landscape with extremes of both climate and geography: ‘Australia. A country of contradictions. Vast and uncrowded. Modern and highly urbanised. … Parched red desert and endless golden summer grasses. Lush primeval green rainforest adjacent to sparkling sandy beaches. Rugged
blue mountains and dazzling white snowfields’ (SOGC 1991). At the same time, the emphasis on environmental restoration was mirrored in attempts to reclaim a lost Olympic innocence and to ensure the legitimacy of the athletic contest. Such a pristine location was considered an appropriate site for the games, predicated as they are on ‘healthy’ bodies engaging in wholesome ‘play’. To this end, the Sydney Olympics were promoted as the ‘green’ games at the same time that Australian sporting authorities assured the public that stringent doping controls would be applied. Consumers were thereby reminded that the natural/Olympic environment was being recovered whilst the sporting results were guaranteed to be the sole outcome of an athlete’s pure bodily performance. The representation of ‘natural’ bodies, competing in ‘natural’ activities in
a ‘natural’ landscape was primary to the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Within official Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG) Image Guidelines, related merchandising and the televisual media, the Australian landscape played a dominant role in Olympic promotional activities. Australia was popularly conceptualised as an environmental paradise in which healthy play could be guaranteed, whilst the vocal, national stance against ‘unnatural’ intrusions into elite athletic competition meant that SOCOG could provide the requisite assurances that the games would remain pure and untainted on a number of levels. Within the production of these landscapes, the relationships between the body, the Olympic site and the Australian nation were revealed. What is important in this analysis is the way that the construction of an uncontaminated athletic body was mirrored in the manufactured ‘nature’ of Homebush Bay, which in turn was represented as a microcosm of the national environment. In this way, the athletic body came to symbolise the national body, and the purity of each was mutually reinforcing. Analysing the relationship between space, sport and the body in this
context reveals a plethora of cultural assumptions about the nature of ‘nature’. The presence of natural bodies in a natural site was a paramount concern in not only Olympic advertising, but amongst sporting bodies themselves, and the success of the event hinged on selling the games as a return to traditional values that eschewed extreme bodily modifications. ‘Nature’, as embodied in the ‘natural athlete’ or the ‘environment’, thus became central to an understanding of not just the Sydney games, but of modern sport itself. Neil Smith (1996: 41) argues that ‘the authority of “nature” as a source of social norms derives from its assumed externality to human interference, the givenness and unalterability of natural events and processes that are not susceptible to social manipulation’. The success of sport rests upon the pure physical performance unaffected by any kind of external interference. The body, in this instance, is isolated from social construction, alone in its pursuit of physical proficiency. The irony here is that neither the body, the site nor the nation is free from manipulation; each is subject to both discursive and physical interference and interpretation.
