‘Leap for London’? Investigating the affective power of the sport spectacle

Abstract

This paper investigates the London 2012 Olympic Bid Campaign, which succeeded in winning the contest to host the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games for London, UK in 2012. Starting from the premise that the highly stylised ‘Leap for London’ campaign itself formed a sport spectacle, we use discourse analysis and autoethnographic research to explore the meanings attached to the bid campaign. Drawing on discourses of race, gender and class, the bid campaign constructed particular, postmodern versions of the city and nation through which Londoners could articulate and experience their social and cultural identities. We contextualise the phenomenon of the Olympic bid campaign within existing work on sport and nation, mega-events, sport and the city and different forms of tourist experience. However, these perspectives fail, perhaps, to illuminate our embodied, passionate responses to events such as the Olympic Games. We draw on the concept of ‘affect’ (Grossberg, 1992; Massumi, 2002) to theorise the power of the sport spectacle, as exemplified by the visual culture surrounding the London 2012 Olympic Bid Campaign, to mobilise nationalist and consumerist sentiment within us.

Keywords:

• sport spectacle
• Olympic Games
• national identity
• affect
• embodied