How do i look? the olympic spectatorship dilemma

The summer Olympic Games is unquestionably one of the world’s most significant media spectacles by a range of measures, including the size and reach of its television audience; the cost of acquiring and exercising broadcast rights to it; and the intensity of political demands for access to it. There has long been a tension between the idea of ‘being there’ in real time and space and the simulation of the in-stadium experience by utilising audio-visual media technologies. Actual attendance at the Olympics will always be limited by opportunity and means, the scarcity of the experience sustaining the cultural capital derived from physical presence. Increasingly, however, the availability of home-stadium technologies, large screens within stadia, and ‘live sites’ in open public space (where sports fans collectively perform for the cameras), have blurred the once pronounced distinction between ‘being there’ and ‘being elsewhere’.
This paper will reflect on established and new ways of seeing the Olympic Games with the assistance of, or wholesale reliance upon, the electronic media. Drawing on an observational study of spectatorship at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, it will consider the socio-cultural implications of the extension of the range of opportunities for Olympic spectatorship. Digitisation and its associated convergence of telecommunications, computing and broadcasting technologies offer unprecedented flexibility in the activity of watching the Olympics, as well as a more active and interactive form of Olympic spectatorship. But such developments also threaten to reproduce the hierarchy of viewing positions imposed in traditional stadium environments, with the escalating cost of some forms of spectatorship, and access restrictions imposed by subscription-based media, potentially compromising the rights of a democratised ‘cultural citizenship’ attached to the Olympic Games. Such media-inspired dilemmas will be critically analysed in addressing the question of how spectators look as both subjects and objects of the Olympic gaze.