ABSTRACT
The gargantuan identity issue within the Olympic telecast continues to be overt (and covert) nationalism. Hall (1996) contends that the theorization of identity “is a matter of considerable political significance” (p. 16) and that we need to understand issues such as nationalism and the politics of identity because “identities are constructed within, not outside discourse” (p. 4). The discourses (and related frames) of NBC’s telecast quickly inform even the casual viewer that NBC’s telecast highlights US athletes at a higher rate than the 11-13 percent of medals that they typically win at an Olympic Games. Many reasons persist, most notably that the Olympics have historically been a channel for the construction and display of nationalisms, and the foregrounding of national identities within the overall construct of the Games. As Ann Meyers Drysdale indicated in her interview, in the Cold War era, the Olympic villains were easy to identify as they wore red and were assessed as television antagonists almost exclusively by their national affiliation. The Olympics highlight political tensions between different countries, usually exacerbating situations more than mollifying them because of the high-pressure “go for the gold” mindset that permeates the Olympic Games and, subsequently, the telecast as the mediated sport product also constructs and celebrates mythologies of nation (Allison, 1986; Kuper, 1994; Sugden, 1995) and political strife between nations. The concept of nationality incorporates a notion of a coherent community with common cultural beliefs and political values, but the reality is that within national boundaries there are divisions, inequalities, and oppositional ideologies (see Anderson, 1983), many of which have been reflected in the Olympics Games and telecast. These differences are certainly true of the United States, a country with deeply rooted differences in areas of gender, ethnicity, and economic class, just to name a few. Dubbing the term “sportocracy”, Abdel-Shehid (2007) claims that:
it is no accident that the re-emergence of United States’ imperialism has taken a ... tone ... of “Bush-speak”, where people across the globe are asked to choose sides as a way to ensure ... something called “security” and “democracy” for what is called “the West”.
