ABSTRACT
Olympic telecasts render the biggest of stories on the grandest of stages. The inception of the first live telecast was at the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin. More than two dozen viewing halls were built in Berlin so the German people could watch the broadcasts. The picture quality was poor, but the link between television and the Olympic Games was established. From that time, the Olympics have been imbued with ultra-competitive nationalism. The Nazis, already exploiting “the new technologies of the mass media in spreading their propaganda domestically”, used the Games as a stage for their own political purposes (Beamish and Ritchie, 2006, p. 34). However, what has been remembered through history is that Black American Jesse Owens won four gold medals in front of the citizens of Nazi Germany, challenging Adolf Hitler’s aspiration to showcase Aryan dominance.
