ABSTRACT
This article examines three sport statues in the United States: Pat Tillman, National Football League player and American soldier; Tommie Smith and John Carlos, 1968 Olympians; and Wilma Rudolph, the first American woman to win three gold medals in track and field at the 1960 Olympic Games. Each statue was analysed in material culture terms as a hegemonic representative of the dominant types of sport statue found in the USA and in terms of their role in American cultural sporting memory, heritage construction and myth-making. Key themes include their forms and functions, their processes of construction, the selection of the artist and the multiple readings of the statue by the public.
