Encoding the Olympics

The Beijing Olympic Games and the Communication Impact Worldwide

Luo Qing, Giuseppe Richeri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135747510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Encoding the Olympics assembles a uniquely representative international team of media experts to provide a comprehensive review of the global impact of media and cultural communications associated with the Beijing 2008 Olympics. Commissioned by the IOC, this pioneering comparative study – the largest in Olympic Games research –provides a ground-breaking, panoramic, cross-cultural perspective on media responses to the leading sports event of the modern world. The representative team that undertook the study includes media commentators and political analysts, sport and media journalists, Sinologists and observers of the Asian Pacific Rim, academics in Olympic Studies and media and communication studies, scholars of the cultural and sociology studies of sport and festival and events managers.

Encoding the Olympics provides a unique, encyclopaedic study that will serve as a versatile resource at several levels – as a textbook or source reference for academic institutions, media public relations agencies that facilitate the work of inter-cultural exchange organisations, and international communication departments of multinational enterprises and international NGOs. This volume analyses global media responses to a mega-sport event on a scale never before attempted.

This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Prologue: When West Met East through the Beijing Olympics

Luo Qing and Giuseppe Richeri

Based on the final report of the research project ‘Communication and the Olympics: the Challenge and Opportunity for Beijing 2008 in Intercultural Exchange’, commissioned by IOC-OSC following selection within the framework of the grand programme set up by the International Olympic Committee's Olympic Studies Centre (OSC), this book is the accomplishment of two years of hard work coordinated by Luo Qing with the cooperation of 12 distinguished research groups worldwide and contributions from nearly 50 professors, researchers, analysts, doctoral candidates and assistants. Back in October 2007 Luo Qing submitted our application to IOC-OSC and took encouragement from the feedback received in December 2007 from the grand programme selection committee comprising world-famous academic experts in the field of Olympic studies and representatives of the OSC. We then got to work on planning the project and presented it to each of our international cooperators in March 2008. This was when the first of the three stages into which the study was divided — media observatory, media collection and report content analysis — began, and the work continued throughout the year with the torch relay, the Olympic competitions, the online survey before and after the Olympics, the literature analysis at the Olympic museum (Lausanne, April 2008) and the International Olympic Academy (Athens, May 2008). This was followed by the organization of academic symposiums in Beijing (Asia Media Forum: Sports Communications and Globalizations), at Athens University in Greece, at Western Sydney University in Australia and at Musashi University in Japan, before returning to the Lausanne IOC for the presentation of the final report (March 2009), open discussion and final editing (until March 2010). This ‘long march’ has been a unique challenge as well as an opportunity for us all, testing our courage and aspirations, discovering exciting new aspects of communication and the Olympics, the West and East meeting through sports, the encoding and decoding of a mega media event, visual metaphor and hegemony.

Olympics Communication Complex: The Unique Case of Beijing 2008 in Intercultural Communication

This research intends to focus on the interactive relationship between communication and the Olympics from the fresh, new perspective of Beijing 2008.

Both the Olympics and communication are growing in size, complexity and impact. The Olympic Games have continuously been challenged by communication: the mass media such as TV, radio and the press are of great importance due to the vast amount of coverage they have dedicated to the event over the past decades. However, with the development of new technologies and new forms of communication, in particular the presence and influence of media convergence in the digital era, the importance of communication in the Olympics has continued to increase, turning the Games into an indispensable observatory to understand the cultural role of sport in our society. [1]

Since their first occurrence, the modern Olympic Games — politically, economically, technologically, culturally — have originated in and have been dominated by the West; however, this balance of forces is currently in question for a multitude of reasons, including economic development in the ‘powerhouse’ economies of the Asia Pacific region; the ‘exhaustion’ of media sport markets in the West; and the potential of emerging markets and consumption patterns in the East. [2] It has been suggested that the 2008 Beijing Olympics marked a turning-point in Olympic history and that we have all been witnesses to a ‘changing of the guard’ in the Olympic movement, with Western domination being replaced by Oriental illumination.

Therefore, Beijing 2008 is a unique case for communication research in Olympic studies, endowed with a singular obligation and responsibility due to its unprecedented and far-reaching significance. Special focus will be placed on the following two trends in contemporary Olympic communication in China:

1. Inside communication: forceful promotion with nationalist aspirations, marketing-led ‘boosterism’, heroic and mega giant narrative, but weak in individual representation and humanistic care for the common people.

2. Outside communication: or as used later, international communication. Beijing, without any doubt would take this opportunity to show off its elegant and rich oriental heritage as well as its new national image to the world and would be expected to contribute cultural diversity to the Olympics. However, due to the long period of limited exchange in communication and misunderstanding of cultural differences, how much of the presentation and content production of the ‘New Beijing, Great Olympics’ would be narrated accurately?

Based on three phases of Olympic Games communication — the torch relay, the opening and closing ceremonies and the competition period — the research adopted a combination of qualitative and quantitative content analysis and additional commentary about the Beijing Olympic period. Taking the Beijing 2008 Olympics as a unique case of communication, this project aimed, on the one hand, to create a cross-cultural approach between East and West in the contemporary ‘Olympics communication complex’ and, on the other hand, to investigate the role of communication, the mass media above all, in constructing the social value of the Olympics.

The Torch Relay in the International Media: Who Were Proportionately Over-represented and Who Were Under-represented?

The 2008 Olympics torch relay, which began in Athens on 24 March and reached Beijing on 29 April, was a heavily mediated ‘ceremony’. The ‘long march’ cannot be considered just in the physical sense of a journey but also as a challenging step in the development of Olympic history, seen as a changing of the guard, with Western domination being replaced by oriental illumination.

Indeed, this Olympic torch relay, viewed comparatively in the international media, presented an unusual microcosm of social life. Who were proportionately over-represented and who under-represented? How was this mediated ceremony reinterpreted globally?

Our first observation period ran from March 2008 to the end of June 2008, starting from the first big event, the Olympic torch lighting ceremony and torch relay. Due to the singular nature of the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the content analysis in the report mainly focused on:

• the torch lighting ceremony

• the international torch relay

• the domestic torch relay — reaching the highest mountain, Qomolangma/Everest

• the Sichuan earthquake: its effect on China and the Olympic preparations

The comparative studies of dozens of selected representative reports from ten different countries showed us that this holy flame, carried around the world under the banner of ‘LIGHT THE PASSION, SHARE THE DREAM’, also produced stark contrasts. When the mediating of a mega-event is inevitable, when the relationship between media and Olympics is so indissoluble, close observation and objective analysis is an ineluctable duty for us.

The evaluation of the mediated Olympic ceremony can be divided into two main stages: coverage and promotion. Because mere faithful coverage of a prestigious live event is far from sufficient for the purposes of commoditization, since the 1980s the philosophy adopted of promoting the mediation of the Olympics (such as reprogramming, representing, re-narrative etc.) has led to the transformation of this mega-event into a highly influential global one. [3] However, the mediation of the Beijing 2008 torch relay ceremony showed a new trend which is described in this enquiry as over-dramatization and visual hegemony. To examine and decode a series of visual reports from the international media coverage of the long march of the Beijing Olympic flame in both press and broadcasting, this research analyses the methods of this dramatization, such as investigative narration, asymmetrical representation of conflicts, pre-set thematic visual editing, hidden layout encoding, induction of subjective assumptions and so on. [4] The Olympic torch, as a part of modern Olympic symbolism, was, according to Baron Pierre de Coubertin ‘a grandiose course, [that] begins from Greece, a country of glory, which has always shone through the centuries and whose spiritual achievements offer solutions to many problems even today’. [5] Nowadays, however, melodrama is privileged and the real message of the flame is made light of, or even ignored. A large number of important political, religious, commercial and social movements and agencies throughout the world try to appropriate the Olympic ceremonies and this phenomenon will become increasingly intense in the future. However, the questions to be pondered are: What are the boundaries for mediating? Will this new trend of mediating be favourable for future Olympic Games? And what kind of visual heritage will it leave for the Olympic ceremony?

The Image of China from the International Communication Perspective

In the research project presented in this volume the subject of the analysis was the Beijing Olympic Games, considered as a major worldwide media event focused on communicating the image of China: a continent-country that has long been isolated from the rest of the world and which in recent decades has, with extraordinary speed, become a major player in the world's economy and politics.

For years China had been the focus of growing attention by the media of the most economically advanced countries. The most discussed issues in these media were its surprising economic growth and the progressive opening-up of the market to the private sector and competition. Reports were often accompanied by critical considerations about the effect of this economic development and liberalization on the living conditions of the Chinese people in general. The undeniable positive impact in economic terms was often overshadowed in Western media by the denouncement of social and territorial inequalities in the country together with constant references to the lack of political freedom and, more generally, of human rights.

All this has created a fundamentally contradictory image of China in public opinion in the West. The main elements of this image seem to be a mixture of surprise and concern: on the one hand, growing surprise over the power of Chinese industry and its ability to conquer international markets; on the other hand, concern over the competition of Chinese products which are undermining the consolidated position of many Western ones. There is also concern about companies that are demobilizing in the West to transfer production to China in order to exploit a more favourable cost regime and to enter a market with a huge potential.

The Beijing Olympic Games were largely meant to improve this image by highlighting to the world China's organizational skills and merits in a spectacular and unprecedented show. These objectives were threatened in the early stages of the games when the Olympic torch, carried from Greece to China, encountered obstacles in different countries caused by pro-Tibet protests. Despite these incidents, examined in our research project, the Olympic Games started and ended according to the original plan.

The most interesting results of this research which we are interested in drawing attention to regard at least two aspects. First, on the whole the media operation seems to have been successful. Indeed, the image of the Beijing Olympic Games conveyed by most of the international media in the stages examined is fundamentally positive. However, besides this general aspect, the research aims to identify the main components and differences that distinguish the media of each country and, within each country, the differences between the various types of media.

The research also highlights another important result related not to problems of the country's representation and image but to interesting aspects for intercultural communication. This is represented by the possibility of observing how the same global event is presented and interpreted in different ways in different countries, focusing on how and to what extent, in today's globalized world, national contexts can still offer the interpretation keys of international events.

It is a pity that there was not a greater balance in the distribution of our research groups (six from Europe compared to three from Asia) and that online survey samples are still too small; it is also clear that the audience's attitude after the Olympics should be followed u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editors' Foreword
• Historical Perspectives series pages
• Sport in the Global Society series pages
• Routledge Online Studies on the Olympic and Paralympic Games Series
• Preface
• IOC Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Prologue: When West Met East through the Beijing Olympics
• 2. Attitudes Towards China Before and After the Beijing Olympics
• Part One: Another Long March of the Symbolic Holy Flame — Comparative Analysis on the Media Coverage of the Torch Relay 2008
• Part Two: Representing the Opening Ceremony
• Part Three: Understanding the Multi-Dimensions of Mediated Olympics
• Part Four: Closing Perspectives
• Index