Media and the Olympics

Article by Richard Simpson. Edited and researched by Harriet Evans.

17 million people, leaning forward, hands sweaty, teeth gritted, dinner burning, stomach churning, eyes squinting, lungs empty, mouths open, tongues dry. On 4 August 2012, a strange phenomenon gripped Britain. As one man ran twenty-five laps of a four hundred metre circuit, he suddenly became involved not in a race for himself, but for the whole nation. He breaks with a lap to go, he keeps clear, he has done it! Men, women and children run around their houses in the victorious ‘Mobot’ position, and even those of us who had never shown any patriotic interest miraculously become fervently British. The cause of this remarkable Olympic fever was none other than that rather dull and stationary object, the television. This uneventful box that spills out the same drivel each week had suddenly united the whole nation in mass hysteria. 

The impact of the media upon our lives cannot be understated; it has grown to become one of the hegemonic forces dominating our daily lives. We are submitted to barrages of bad news and celebrity culture tosh, but occasionally, just occasionally, we hear and see something that we want to. The Olympics was just one of those moments when we dispel all our complaints and embrace the media as an entertaining institution. This event that only comes around every four years has grown enormously in its one hundred and sixteen year history, and this growth appears remarkably entwined with the development of the broadcasting services. 

The London 1908 Olympics was the fourth Olympics of the modern era. A last minute event, planned in just two years after the Rome Olympics was abruptly cancelled following the eruption of Vesuvius. The longest games in history, lasting a total 187 days, played host to a variety of odd events, from tug of war to motorboat racing. This was a distinctly amateurish event, and the coverage matched this unsophisticated nature. For at the dawn of the modern Olympic era, neither the radio, the television nor the internet existed. This left the primary method distribution of information in the hands of the newspapers. Articles, such as this one below by the Daily Mirror on July 20 1908, documented the progress of the British athletes as they fought to compete with the rest of the world. Yet, the impact of the media in London’s first Olympics was not confined to spreading the news of the events alone. Indeed the competition may not have even begun had it not been for the support of the newspapers. With budgets tight and no government investment, the organisers were forced to rely on ticket sales and donations to fund the cost of £80,000. An official noted that the last £20,000 was raised by ‘A spirited appeal issued by the Daily Mail at the very last moment [which] produced the most liberal results.’ The media was therefore instrumental in the creation of the first London Olympics, and this link between the two mediums of entertainment would only grow stronger in the following years. 

Athletes returned to London forty years after their first visit. During those years the city had been through a lot. The barrage of bombs had only stopped falling three years prior to the Olympics arrival, and London was in a state of rebuilding. These games were the ‘Austerity Games’, where even the athletes had to undergo a tightening of their belts. The American hurdler Craig Dixon remembers that ‘One little potato and one piece of meat was all they could get’, as even the athletes had to abide by the post-war rationing. But, there were some developments since the fourth Olympics particularly in the field of technology. Radios had become common within homes across the country, and it was twelve years since the first regular television programmes had been developed. In 1948, however, the television was still rather primitive, with a mere two percent of households owning a licence, and coverage of the actual event only amounted to only sixty four and a half hours. This meant that the viewing figures for the opening ceremony barely reached half a million. This left the major coverage of the Olympic Games to the medium of radio, and in the hands of the British Broadcasting Corporation which had been operating radio since 1922. The BBC’s twenty six years of business in radio had allowed it to develop to a thoroughbred media outlet. For the event, there were eight radio stations in operation and thirty two channels, fifteen commentary positions and lines could reach thirty Olympic venues. With the majority of families owning a radio, this coverage provided by the BBC brought the Olympics into the country’s front rooms. The commentators not only supplied coverage in English but in forty other languages which was broadcast around the world, turning the event into a truly global phenomenon. 

The growth of the Olympics can and should only be seen as deeply entwined with the development of the media. From those early days when the public could only hear of their hero’s performance through the broadsheets to the present when it is difficult to escape news of how British athletes are competing. The Olympics has changed from its amateurish origins to a sleek and professional event. This progression must be seen as result of the media, which allowed the Olympics to enter the living rooms of not just our British homes, but of homes across the world. First through the simple broadsheet, then through the invisible waves of the radio and television and finally with the internet, the media has given the Olympics a pathway into our lives. And it is this pathway that has allowed the Olympics to become the global phenomenon that it is today.