Dr. Dorothy Collins
Associate Professor of Sport Management at Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio. Dr. Collins’ primary research interests center on sport fan identity and the extent to which individuals use sport to create communities rich in social capital.
Email: dcollins@lec.edu
The 2024 Summer Olympics held in Paris marked a return to the spectacular global mega-event that has become the expectation for the Olympics since the 1976 Montreal Games. After COVID-19 led to a delayed and scaled down 2020 Tokyo games (held in 2021) that had no spectators, the 2024 Games kicked off with an opening ceremony that was not only a spectacle celebrating French culture and camp. According to the Thomas Jolly, the architect of the opening ceremonies, the production was meant to highlight themes of inclusion and freedom that he associates with what it means to be French.
That said, the modern Olympic Games are a “made for TV” event, and American audiences see only what the media chooses to broadcast. The opening ceremony proved especially challenging in this regard because it occurred as a live procession through the city. As a result, the primetime broadcast in America was not even close to identical to the live broadcast, which aired in the afternoon, with the taped version focusing more heavily on Americans and storytelling than the live broadcast. Perhaps because of this Americanized primetime version, many people seem to forget that the Olympics, and its opening ceremony, is an international global event, that is meant to highlight the culture and values of the host nation.
Watching from their living rooms, however, Americans had widely divergent reactions to the opening ceremony. In the days after the opening ceremony, social media fueled a firestorm over what some Americans perceived as making a mockery of Christianity, based on a scene featuring drag queens, a transgender model, and a naked singer at a long table, reminiscent of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. The organizers, however, intended to display a pagan party, honoring the Gods of Olympus, and in particular Dionysus (the naked singer) the god of wine, celebration, and the father of Sequana, the goddess associated with the river Seine which runs through, and which hosted not only the boat parade of athletes but several Olympic events.
Perusing social media makes it easy to surmise which social identities are most salient for many individuals, based on what they post about. Surprisingly, it was not individuals for whom social identity based on religious affiliation was dominant that were unequivocally outraged over the display. Other social identities based on sexual orientation, gender identification, level of education, generational group, and level of sport fandom also failed to create a clear consensus about the opening ceremony. In fact, the only social identity that was a consistent predictor of how individuals reacted to the opening ceremony was a strong sense of political affiliation.
After the primetime version aired, social media made it clear that if the salience of individuals’ social identity based on their political affiliations was high, it would influence their opinions of the opening ceremony and color their perceptions of the games themselves.
Devotees of former president Donald Trump have often been described as cult-like and, as such, it is unsurprising that affiliation with Trump is a very important, if not the most salient, social identity for many of these individuals. Social media postings from these individuals, while discussing the inappropriateness of what they saw as making a mockery of Christianity, did so regardless of whether they held a strong sense of identity connected to Christianity. Much like their rhetoric in other aspects of life, these individuals displayed outrage at the existence of anything that does not honor or depict their perception of traditional American values and norms. Similarly, individuals with a strong sense of identity based on an affiliation with left-leaning politicians and groups were quick to praise the opening ceremony for preaching a message of tolerance and inclusion. Furthermore, these individuals were likely to post content criticizing those offended by the opening ceremony as poorly educated, unwilling to accept diversity or culture that was not their own, and opponents of freedom. As such, the controversy surrounding the opening ceremony provides a mirror of the societal divides created social identity based on political affiliation.
In addition, social media postings demonstrated that individuals’ views of the opening ceremony influenced their perception of the Games themselves. For example, those who displayed strong social identity connected to right-wing political affiliation, were deeply committed to the idea that left-wing conspiracies influenced the results of competition to favor racial minorities and LGBTQIA+ individuals. To the contrary, those individuals whose social media sites showed strong identification with liberal political groups and politicians applauded the increased diversity in sports such as gymnastics and the acceptance of transgender athletes in the Games.
The IOC has decried the politicization of the Olympics; however, this controversy demonstrates how Americans have politicized the Games. Those with social identities based on right wing political affiliations suggest that the Games prove that there is an imminent threat to the American way of life. Social identity based on political affiliation has a high level of salience for many Americans, who used social media and the Olympics to promote the political ideology espousing that they are victims, robbed of the social power to which they feel entitled. By choosing a global event to apply American social norms to, and condemning it based on those norms signifies that they attempt to reinforce the “American first” ideology, which is central to their social identity.
