Culture, Politics and Sport

Blowing the Whistle, Revisited

Garry Whannel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415417075
• eBook ISBN: 9781134115600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

'Whannel is a foundational figure in the study of sports and the media. …For 20 years his writing has set a high standard …and it remains an inspiration to many' - Toby Miller, Professor of Cultural Studies, New York University, USA

Garry Whannel's text Blowing the Whistle: The Politics of Sport broke new ground when it was first published in 1983. Its polemical discussion brought sports as cultural politics into the academic arena and set the agenda for a new wave of researchers.

Since the 1980s sport studies has matured both as an academic discipline and as a focus for mainstream political and public policy debate. In Culture, Politics and Sport: Blowing the Whistle, Revisited, Garry Whannel revisits the themes that led his first edition, assessing their 1980s context from our new millennium perspective, and exploring their continued relevance for contemporary sports academics.

This revisited volume will appeal to undergraduate students and researchers in sports and cultural studies.

Garry Whannel is Professor of Media Cultures and Director of the Centre for International Media Analysis at the University of Bedfordshire. His previous books include Media Sports Stars: Masculinities and Moralities, Fields in Vision: Television Sport and Cultural Transformation, Understanding Sport (co-authored with John Horne and Alan Tomlinson) and Understanding Television (co-edited with Andrew Goodwin), all published by Routledge.

Part 1
The politics of sport

1
Introduction

July 2005 was an extraordinary month for news events, especially for a Londoner. The Live 8 concerts, the announcement of London’s Olympic bid, the London tube and bus bombings, and the opening of the G8 talks all happened in less than a week. The following week I travelled to China, attending a conference and the closing ceremony of a cultural festival organised by the Beijing Olympic Committee, and I observed coverage of the second wave of attempted bombings in London, and subsequent events, on CNN. Real Madrid were staying in the same Beijing hotel that we were based in, placing us briefly in the eye of a celebrity storm. The events of July 2005, my own relationship to them and trajectory through them, and the various interconnections between them prompted me to wonder what I was actually doing in writing a book on sport and politics. The politics of sport suddenly seemed somewhat parochial.

The Live 8 concerts on 2 July appeared to be a spectacular success, and a demonstration of the spectacular power of global television spectacle, but of course the television image doesn’t tell you much about the experience of being there. The privileged golden circle, the area at the front reserved for privileged guests and corporate clients, was clearly visible and the segregation of a rich elite seemed to echo and symbolise the very disparity of resources the concerts were supposedly addressing. The relative absence of black acts, at least in London, was a mistake, and the organisers really should have known better than to compound the error with the crass concept of a separate concert, with predominantly black musicians, way down in the west country. None of this detracted from the huge success of the central mission to push demands for action on poverty and debt relief to the top of the news agenda. For much of the twentieth century, one of the biggest problems confronting the left has been how to mount political campaigns that have effectivity. On this count, the concerts and the associated campaign were exemplary.

By any standards, the 6 July announcement by the International Olympic Committee, in Singapore, of the result of the Olympic bidding race, was a major news moment. It had the suddenness and immediacy of a revelation of the unknown, it involved major nations and star individuals, it had drama, and the sensation of an unexpected and un-predicted outcome. The success of London’s bid to stage the 2012 Games took almost everyone by surprise. Paris had been hot favourites since the start of the race over two years earlier. Most experts agreed that London had gained a lot of ground and that the vote would now be close, but that Paris would still win. Even the bid team, despite their immaculately crafted public relations optimism, did not, I believe, really expect to win. So the announcement came as a huge shock in Paris, and as a major sensation in London.

The most striking feature of the London bid was its superb media management. The British media, especially in its tabloid variants, can be very quick to circulate negative and critical stories, especially, in the sporting context, where there is the slightest hint of indecisiveness, amateurism or ineptitude. The precedents of major project mismanagement (the Millennium Dome, the Pickett’s Lock Athletics Stadium fiasco, the new Wembley Stadium) were readily available. Yet for the last year, the media coverage of the bid was overwhelmingly positive. Clearly the bid was well run, and, as we now know, achieved success against the odds, but its handling of the press was adroit. One suspects discreet political pressure was also brought to bear upon sports editors. In normal circumstances, following the triumphant moment, there would have been two or three days of front page coverage, featuring celebrations in London, the return of the conquering heroes of the bid team, analyses of ‘how we won it’, and projections of the work to be done before 2012. However, less than 24 hours later came the barbarity of the tube bombings.

Just before 9.00am on Thursday 7 July, three bombs went off on tube trains in central London, followed around 45 minutes later by a bomb on a bus. A total of 54 people were killed and hundreds injured. The emergency services, benefiting from major incident planning and rehearsal, appeared to cope very well. Nonetheless, London was plunged into a period of fear, confusion and uncertainty. The entire tube system was shut down for most of the day, many buses re-routed or suspended, and the mobile phone system collapsed under the volume of calls.¹ News of the events was followed around the world on rolling news channels. As with the inhabitants of any city, Londoners had an intense awareness of the closeness of the trauma. Most will have travelled through the affected stations at some point, many of them every day. It was all too easy to imagine ‘what if’.

I live about 600 metres from the bus explosion, which took place on my normal route to work. The tube explosions were all within a mile of my home. An old friend, staying with me, had set off to travel on a route that would have taken him through one of the affected stations. A fellow academic, in my own field of study, was amongst the injured. Another colleague, from my own university, missed boarding one of the target trains by less than a second. I spent the morning staring out of the window, hearing sirens and watching aimless and stunned crowds milling around whilst, like most of my fellow Londoners, trying to phone relatives and friends, and, of course, staring at the extraordinary scenes on the television.

Indeed, it was striking how the television was the major source, even for someone living within a couple of blocks of the explosions. Despite my own relative proximity, basically I experienced the events in very similar form to people around the world – watching images of police, ambulances and cordons, staring at the stream of updated information scrolling across the screen and tensing every time a new ‘Breaking News’ banner appeared. On my one descent to street level, it became clear that no one milling around had any clearer sense of what was going on, indeed the absence of media access left them largely uninformed. I returned to the television.

The London bombings stole the news agenda away from G8, which was, conceivably, part of the intention. The G8 summit was, of course, another global spectacle, staged for the cameras, in which the issues supposedly up for debate had largely been sorted out by officials and politicians days or weeks before. Rather as with the Live 8 concerts, African figures became marginal, as the politician stars of the most powerful nations assumed centre stage. The Make Poverty History demonstration offered its own spectacle with the attractive Edinburgh backdrop. Overshadowed by the Live 8 concert it also illustrated, once again, a sad facet of dominant news values – a dozen people in a violent confrontation will get more media coverage than 100,000 who demonstrate peacefully. Meanwhile, the project of easing Africa into modernity through the imposition of Western capitalist neoliberal economic policies being nurtured by the G8 countries offers a frame for understanding the ways in which the Olympic Games and the World Cup have become icons of enterprise that serve as gateways to modernity. Indeed the World Cup, and probably the Olympic Games too, will be staged in Africa early this century.

Less than a fortnight after these dramatic and traumatic events in the UK, I was in Beijing for a conference. I was also able to attend the Closing Ceremony of a cultural festival staged by the Beijing Olympic Organising Committee. This concert of popular music took place in a medium-size auditorium and was also broadcast by television. Like many events of its kind, the event was stage managed for television cameras, with the audience occasionally present, visually, as a cheering mass. Indeed we were carefully rehearsed in our role, given luminous wands, drilled in the manner in which we should wave them and trained to produce wild enthusiasm on cue. As so often on such occasions, the slightly tawdry feel of the dry ice, lighting effects and tinsel, when witnessed directly, is transformed by the magic of television into a spectacular and glamorous sparkle. While the evening was a fascinating and enjoyable experience, it was clear that the impression produced for the television cameras was the primary objective of the occasion.

The conference I attended was a largely Asian event, in which the few Western delegates, for the most part, were doing more listening and less talking, as issues such as media access, censorship and the digital divide were discussed. The conference banquet took place in the Great Hall of the People, and the whole experience of being in Beijing prompted reflection on the strange paradox of China’s dynamic economic development, within the framework of an authoritarian communist state. They call it market socialism, but to an outsider it does not appear so very different from consumer capitalism. In China, in Latin America, in Europe and even in the USA, the big cultural differences now seem to be between urban and rural communities rather than between economic systems.

We were staying in the same hotel as Real Madrid, whose imminent arrival prompted a frenzy of activity by builders and decorators attempting to finish the new marble and glass lobby area. The outside of the hotel and the reception area were under siege from teenage Chinese girls with posters, banners and albums of players, and photographers held back by a cordon of security guards. Nor were the conference delegates immune from the siren call of celebrity. Several of us could be seen lurking around the reception area with a studied nonchalance intended to suggest we were merely waiting for the business centre to open. The level of excitement rose as their coach arrived and the players filed through the lobby. Beckham and Raul strode to the lifts amidst screams, whilst Luis Figo paused to greet a rotund male Chinese friend, to the distress of his admirers, who felt they were far more worthy of the great man’s attention. Only Real Madrid’s manager came over, with a big beam, to shake hands and sign autographs for people, many of whom may have been unsure precisely who he was. Real Madrid were on the Chinese leg of a pre-season tour that took them to the USA, China, Japan and Thailand capitalising on their worldwide fame, and boosting the merchandising of their team brand.² Indeed their purchase of David Beckham was driven partly by his prominence in the Asian market in the wake of the 2002 World Cup. This demanding itinerary is not ideal pre-season training and the players appeared exhausted and drained of energy. Their lacklustre mode of self-presentation continued on the pitch – a match played in atrocious conditions after heavy rain all day turned the playing surface into a quagmire, and the team gained negative publicity in the press. After they left Manchester United arrived, on a similar merchandise-inspired tour, and looking similarly drained and jetlagged. I was not surprised that neither side fared well in the Champions League in the 2005–6 season.

On Thursday 21 July came news of a new wave of bombings on London trains and buses. This time, fortunately, the devices failed to explode. I spent much of the day in my Beijing hotel room watching news of the attempted bombings on CNN. A car filled with bombs had already been found a few days earlier, at Luton Station, near where I work. Indeed, I had walked past the car just a few hours before the police found it, and cordoned off the station, causing me to return home by coach instead of train. Now I was confronted with images very familiar to me – of Warren Street Station, our nearest tube station, of University College Hospital, at the end of our street, and of Stockwell Station, near where we lived for three years. British people of my generation grew up in what was, by world standards, a safe and affluent environment. A prevalent sensibility, a residue of Empire days but still retaining a certain force, was that ‘danger’ happened overseas. The rest of the world was exotic, other, different, strange and dangerous, whilst home was safe. So, strange it was to be in that most exotic of places for an Englishman, Beijing, deep in the heart of the ‘orient’ of the colonial imagination, but in that most safe of environments, a five star hotel, staring at images of home, in which home had suddenly become associated with risk, fear, danger and paranoia. One of the striking characteristics of the post-colonial world is that the polarities are reversed: core becomes peripheral, peripheral becomes core, home becomes strange whilst the other becomes familiar. All that is solid melts into air, and as black British academic Stuart Hall succinctly put it to a largely white audience, ‘now that you are all de-centred, I feel centred’.

These experiences also prompted reflection on the problem of separating image and experience. In early writing on the media, analysts confidently counterposed a concrete embedded and grounded world of situated experiences with the less tangible but more universalised domain of images, symbols and representations. This distinction is now much harder to sustain. Experience and image entangle each other in ways that are both concrete and disembodied, both global and local, both personal and general, both safe and threatening. Indeed in many social contexts, image seems solid, and experience tentative. In major sporting events, at moments of dramatic action, all eyes turn to the giant screens for insight and clarity.

July 2005 was dramatic and traumatic, for Londoners in particular, although it is always salutary to remember that such carnage is merely a feature of daily life in places such as Baghdad. My own reflections on these events prompted three thoughts. First, impression management has become a central practice of our times. The world is experienced, perceived and consumed largely through the media; so the impression conveyed in media representation becomes crucial. In different ways, the organisers of Live 8, G8, Olympic bidding committees, and even those who plant bombs, understand this and, in radically different ways, attempt to exploit it to their advantage. Second, major events are consumed around the world, and public reaction can be fed into the process with great speed, producing an intensity of focus, which, in Media Sport Stars, I termed vortextuality. Third, the events underlay the extent to which risk, fear, suspicion and paranoia have become central organising principles of Western politics. It was with these disconcerting thoughts to the fore that I turned, in the summer of 2005, to writing the final draft of this book.

The most immediately striking sporting question in July 2005 was, how did London get awarded the 2012 Olympic Games? London had momentum, in the sense of a late-running horse coming from behind in the final furlong. In the race to be awarded the Games, Paris was the front-runner from a very early stage, which produces its own problems. There is a tendency to feel that you should not do too much, as there is always a danger of making a mistake that will weaken your bid. So early front-runners have a tendency to lose momentum. By contrast, London, after a late start and a poor start, slowly gained credibility and then began to address its own weaknesses, making a good impression, winning support, and crucially, gaining momentum. It gradually began to impress people as a coherent bid from a well-organised team.

President Chirac is an adept and experienced front person for a bid. He had presented Paris’s bid, to good effect, in 1986.³ But this time, the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, devoted two days to attending the IOC Session in Singapore in July 2005, when, manifestly, he had other tasks, not least the imminent G8 summit, on his plate. The IOC members are important and powerful people who are used to being courted, and who are not easily flattered. But a head of state or prime minister devoting significant time to them will have made a favourable impression. Juan Antonio Samaranch, Ex-President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), remains a powerful figure in the IOC. He is very fond of the British bid leader Seb Coe, and encouraged Coe to get fully involved in the IOC as Coe’s running career came to an end during the late 1980s. Samaranch appears to regard him almost as a favoured son. When Madrid was eliminated, London benefited. Samaranch knows the streng...

Table of contents

• Routledge Critical Studies in Sport
• Contents
• Figures
• Series editor’s foreword
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Part 1 The politics of sport
• Part 2 Sport, cultural politics and political culture since 1983
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index