Essay on Consumer Culture of Late Capitalism

The world of sports in the age of mass media has been transformed from nineteenth century amateur recreational participation to late twentieth century spectator-centered technology and business. The older traditions were not perfect, any more than current practices are entirely imperfect.

The shifts are well illustrated in the Olympic movement. Even more than in other sports, aristocratic privilege, not commercial sponsorship, sustained the Olympic movement in its well- documented first decades, with no patronage more generous than from de Coubertin himself (Guttmann, 1992;).

Lucas 1980, 1992; MacAloon, 1981). But when the games after World War I began to gather momentum as major international events with increasing press coverage and general recognition, public and commercial support became more prominent in maintaining the Olympics, first from sponsoring cities and later from television rights fees and corporate sponsorship.

These institutions the modern city-state and commercial businesses could not pretend to float above the necessities of material existence as had the previous Olympic aristocracy.

With the release of Leni Riefenstahl’s two-part Olympia film (Graham, 1986), as well as experimentation with television at the Berlin games, the intrusion of the moving image into the Olympics began. This increased from mid-century with the 1956 Melbourne organizing committee being the first to sell television rights to the games.

As broadcast networks in the United States and Europe boycotted the rights sale, the programming in the United States resulted in only six pre-recorded, half-hour programs presented on a scattering of independent stations; but the principle of commercial Olympic television had been established, and the Olympics would never again be the same.

Perhaps no other single force ha§ contributed more to the post modernizing of the Olympics than television coverage in general and television rights fees in particular.

They have created a new relationship between the public and the games at the same time as they have brought the dynamics of “late capitalism” (Mandel, 1975) into the Olympic movement.

The television rights fees for the Summer Olympics have increased several hundredfold in the second half of the twentieth century. The United States commercial networks have generally paid some 50 to 75 percent of the total Olympic revenue from television rights and production costs.

After mid-century, television revenues quickly replaced Olympic ticket sales as the principle source of income from the Games. In 1960 Television provided only 1 of every 400 US dollars of the cost of hosting the Summer Olympics.

In 1972, 1 of every 50 dollars was from television; in 1980, of every 15 dollars; and by 1984, 1 of every 2 dollars of Olympic host costs were paid for from television revenues (Real, 1989).

This immersion of the Olympics in the Media Sport world of television exposure and rights fees has been followed by rapidly increasing commercial sponsorship of the Games and teams themselves.

The Olympic Program (TOP), formed in 1982 by the IOC, has combined with the marketing consortium International Sports and Leisure (ISL) to sell corporate sponsorships at a level approaching a 50-50 split with income from television rights.

TOP contracts with Coca-Cola, Eastman Kodak, 3M, Ricoh, Matsushita, Sports Illustrated, Visa, and US Postal Express in 1992 brought in more than $120 million to the IOC (J. Lucas, 1992, p. 79). The 1984 Los Angeles Games pioneered this approach; even selling rights to one company for advertise itself as the “Official Olympic Specimen Carrier” because it transported the urine samples of athletes to laboratories.

Television exposure and commercialization prepared the environment for this additional corporate commercial sponsorship, sponsorship which brought $179 million in 1996 to the IOC from one transnational corporation alone, the Coca-Cola Company based in Atlanta (J. Lucas, 1992).

The intrusion of late capitalism’s commercialism into MediaSports through television and sponsorships signals the economic shift from the modern to the postmodern Games. Echoed by hundreds of other critics, British historian Steven Barnett (1990, p. 134) warns: “The Olympic Games could be hijacked by an obsessively competitive American television industry, whose money will eventually corrupt completely the original spirit.”

The changes from the aristocratic but idealistic modern games of de Coubertin to the pragmatically profit-centered postmodern games point to the qualities of “late capitalism” as described by Fredric Jameson in his widely debated analysis of postmodernism.