ABSTRACT
The legacies of the modern Olympics litter the landscape of the twentieth century, and have begun to crop-up in the new terrain of the twenty-first century. The Olympics gave birth to their great rival in the quest to garner the enthusiasm of the world's fans, the World Cup football tournament. [1] Beginning during the 1930s in Los Angeles and Berlin, the Olympics sparked the merger of the global sports and entertainment industries, producing a powerful new conglomerate that now consumes the attention of billions of people and creates the world's most popular stars, a diverse group that ranges from Michael Phelps to Maria Sharapova, from David Beckham to Usian Bolt, from Liu Xiang to Tiger Woods, and from the ‘Flying Tomato’ to Ronaldo. This global conglomerate generates enormous profits, consumes entire television networks for weeks a time, [2] and has spawned a lingua franca that simultaneously reinforces and transcends national and cultural borders. [3]
