Shadowed by the corpse of war: Sport spectacles and the spirit of terrorism

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, there has been a groundswell of research on terrorism and sports mega-events, including investigations into the impact of ‘9/11’ on fear and risk management strategies at high profile sports events. In this article, we re-examine the case of the Salt Lake City Winter Games of 2002 around Baudrillard’s (1995) concept of the ‘non-event’. We compare the (largely British and North American) mass mediation and discursive framing of terrorism at the 2002 Games with subsequent discourses interwoven into accounts of terrorism, fear and security at the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens and the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Turin. Of principal interest is the global framing of sports mega-events as targets of terrorism and the ways in which such events become fabricated zones of risk. To understand why there is a lingering media construction of the sports mega-event as an imagined target (and, in many ways, pre-constructed victim) of terrorism, we draw centrally on Baudrillard’s work (1995, 2001, 2002a, 2002b). Specifically, we employ Baudrillard’s concepts of the hyperreal and the non-event as a means of exploring terrorism’s relationship with sport, and the potential usage of such theoretical ideas in the sociology of sport and physical culture more broadly.