Dr. Michael L. Butterworth
Director of the Center for Sports Communication & Media and Professor of Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. His research explores connections between rhetoric, democracy, and sport, with particular interests in national identity, militarism, and public memory.
Email: michael.butterworth@austin.utexas.edu
Twitter: @BurntO_Butterwo
Dr. Douglas Hartmann
Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Hartmann is author of Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy(Chicago 2016); his current project is “Ballers and Backlash: Ten Years of Protest, Populism, and Polarization in American Sports.”
Email: hartm021@umn.edu
The Opening Ceremony for the 2024 Summer Olympics was a true spectacle. Set along the River Seine, with downtown Paris and the Eiffel Tower providing the backdrop, organizers arranged nods to French history (Les Miserables, Marie Antoinette, Joan of Arc), staged impressive musical performances (from Lady Gaga to Celine Dion, from mezzo-sopranoAxelle Saint-Cirel to heavy metal band Gojira), and celebrated French influences on fashion and culture. And, yes, there was a ménage à trois and a portrayal of the 17th Century painting by Jan van Bijlert called “The Feast of the Gods.” Or, was it Leonardo da Vinci’s 15th Century depiction of Christ at “The Last Supper”?
The performance’s creative director, Thomas Jolly, insists the scene portrays Dionysus, because “he’s the god of feasting, of wine, and the father of Sequana, the goddess of the River Seine.” For some Christian conservatives, however, especially in the United States, the resemblance of the scene’s composition to the Last Supper and the presence of “drag queens, a transgender model, [and] a naked singer dressed up as the Greek god of wine Dionysus” was a form of religious blasphemy, with even the Vatican issuing a statement insisting, “At a prestigious event where the whole world comes together to share com En Plumes values, there should be no allusions ridiculing the religious convictions of many people.”
There are critiques to be made about the legitimacy of bringing religious and domestic objections to a ceremony that is supposed to allow a host nation to present itself and its vision of culture, history, and sport to the world. However, our interest lies in what this controversy reveals about the state of conservative politics in the United States and its relationship to sports, and how this alliance was enabled, inadvertently we believe, by NBC’s coverage of the ceremony for American television audiences.
Paris is six hours ahead of the East Coast, meaning that US viewers were tuning in to live coverage of the ceremony, which lasted over four hours, between 10:30 am and 1:30 pm. The more highly-packaged and truncated prime time broadcast, hosted by Mike Tirico, Kelly Clarkson, and Peyton Manning, began at 7:30 pm EDT. Combined, 28.6 million viewers tuned in, the highest ratings since the London Olympics of 2012. Immediate reactions to the spectacle were varied, but a recurring theme was that it was big, bold, very French, and more than a little confusing. For the US audience, that confusion stems, at least partly, from the NBC production.
NBC’s broadcast was heavy on expressions of awe by Clarkson and Manning and light on substantive narration or historical context from Tirico. The announcers were given little help by editing decisions that jumped from one glimpse of the spectacle to another, leaving those watching at home to infer connections between, say, Lady Gaga’s pre-recorded version of the French standard, “Mon Truc En Plumes,” a dizzying sequence in which a decapitated Marie Antoinette sang along with Gojira, and a sudden cross-promotional appearance by the Minions. The French organizers probably could have done more to develop the ritual aspects of the ceremony or the symbolic meaning of the torch relay. With spectacle overtaking ritual and insufficient direction from NBC, viewers were left to craft their own uncertain and perhaps uncomfortable interpretations. And it is this gap, this relative void of historical context and cultural specificity, which Christian conservatives jumped to fill.
First, we are struck by the projection of US politics into a global event hosted by France. Fueled, at least in part, by the “America First” rhetoric of Donald Trump, US conservatives have become increasingly hostile to forces of globalizationand internationalism. Coupled with long-standing patterns of anti-intellectualism, such a position shuns cultural and political understandings of those outside the United States. That the displays of the ceremony were French only intensifies the antipathy; the French, after all, have long been the avatar of an effeminate, weak form of political liberalism. Here, the conservative reaction to the French Olympic ceremony lines up with an implicit critique of American progressive politicians who, presumably, would bring similar moral depravity to the nation.
Second, we contend the shifting conditions of the 2024 presidential race have left conservatives grasping for new strategies. Indeed, since President Joe Biden’s announcement on July 21 that he would not seek reelection, political momentum appears to have swung in favor of the Democratic Party. Democrats have consolidated support for Vice President Kamala Harris, and few of the Republican counters have yet found traction. This context may help to explain why conservatives, who have doubled down on identity politics such as Trump expressing doubts about Harris’s racial authenticity, saw fit to focus on the opening to the Paris Games.
It is not clear how much sympathy these criticisms will find among the American electorate. In the Olympic context, one senses that viewers may find the energy and festival nature that seems to be building in Paris to be compelling. Strong ratings for the Summer Games thus far suggest that millions of viewers are watching, even if religious conservatives are not among them. And only time will tell if or how the competitions and cultural politics being played out in the Paris Games manifest themselves in various domestic and international contexts.
