Cycles of Representation | Part Two
A critical examination of the production of meaning in the contemporary English language cycling media
Note: This is a recreation of the 2007-published Cycles of Representation, based on unfinished files on floppy disks (remember those?). It differs from the published version you may have read, and from the version available in archives.
CHAPTER ONE: POSTMODERN SHIFTS AND THE PRODUCTION OF CYCLING MEDIA TEXTS
Cycling’s unique relationship with the production of its media texts, and the mediation that occurs as a result of this, is an important and particularly well documented aspect of the sport’s history (a useful example of this documentation is Fabien Wille’s excellent account in his essay “The Tour as an Agent of Change in Media Production” in Dauncey & Hare (eds) The Tour de France 1903-2003: A Century of Sporting Structures, Meanings and Values). The Tour de France, cycle sport’s most prestigious event, was originally conceived as a marketing stunt for the L’Auto sports newspaper in 1903, and continues to remain closely linked to the newspaper’s successor, L’Equipe, over a century later. The same is true of the race’s Italian equivalent, the Giro d’Italia, whose founding newspaper, the Gazetta Della Sport, is even represented by the pink coloured jersey worn by the race leader, which mirrors the newspaper’s distinctive colour scheme. By relying on mediation to provide the narratives and performances that captivated its audience, and with newspaper sales as a direct interest for race directors and an indirect interest for riders, manufacturers, and sponsors as a means of providing wages, prize money and profits, the sport became unyieldingly linked to its own representation. With the sport’s spheres of influence so closely related from the very beginning, both physically and in terms of interests, cycle sport developed a symbiotic relationship with the production of its media that made it the world’s first “mediasport” (Maso, 2005:81-83), an integration of media and sport into a combined totality (Real, 1998:15).
Postmodernism
A difficult aspect of attempting to analyse professional road cycle racing’s unique and complex relationship with its media is, as Hugh Dauncey and Geoff Hare describe, that cycling has long been “a pre-modern contest in a post-modern context.” (Dauncey & Hare, 2003). Indeed, the Tour de France as a site for the reproduction of pre-modern and modernist metanarratives, particularly those to do with French nationality, is regularly touted as evidence as to the validity of this argument. It is not hard to understand why – the Tour’s route “annually maps out the traditional physical boundaries of the Frances of both the Ancien Régime and post-revolutionary Republican eras.” (Dauncey & Hare, 2003:3). Dauncey and Hare discuss the Tour’s fascination with traditionally disputed boundaries, particularly those of the Alsace-Lorraine region, with ominous foreshadowing – at the 2004 Tour de France, less than two years after their text was published, Thomas Voeckler, a young Alsatian, would be elevated to the role of France’s national cycling hero through the amalgamation of strong media performances from the Tour’s organisers, the French media company Channel 1, and Voeckler himself. This elevation of a reasonably unknown rider into France’s national darling was not necessarily unexpected given the imminent retirement of Richard Virenque, France’s previous hero, but a rider originating from the Alsace region taking the yellow leader’s jersey whilst also the national champion of France during the 60th anniversary of the country’s liberation is a particularly poignant, and perhaps even rudimentary, example of the ways in which cycle sport continues to be used to reassert national identities.
Nevertheless, cycle sport is no longer the pre-modern contest Dauncey and Hare describe. For the most part, and especially in English language media, cycling does not support metanarratives, but instead is a site of metadiscourse as the values of the sport itself and its audiences and fiduciaries are the construct of a constant debate between a number of various interests. National identity can be waived in favour of supporting team-mates and, more importantly, sponsors during an important race, demonstrated in the 2005 World Road Race Championships, in which several British riders were chastised for accepting money to race for the Italian team in a particularly literal example of how late capitalism can corrupt motives. Like the events and media that surround and portray him or her, the cyclist is no longer interested in international idealism, but instead supporting and benefiting from the “institutions of late capitalism and the resulting values of postmodernism.” (Real, 1993:18). He is not a competitor in a pre-modern contest, but instead a participant in a postmodern structure.
So too is the English language cycling media undergoing a process of adopting postmodern values and systems, a bricolage of borrowed signs and signifiers. Its development into a pastiche of modern technologies and historical models of cycling representation, creating a format that constantly acknowledges its own existence through self-reflexivity and intertextual references to previous texts, is increasingly noticeable. By operating under a global model, the contemporary English language media cannot express and emphasise national identity and superiority in the same way that L’Auto and its contemporaries could, yet it continues to use similar devices to reinforce a transnational identity acting on behalf of Anglo-Saxon culture. Likewise, while traditional racial stereotyping can no longer be relied upon to create narratives and bolster the “characters” of the race (albeit largely for reasons pertaining to factors other than the globalisation of the media), the Anglophone media does again subtly recycle this traditional value in its representations of, for example, the Protestant work ethic through the notion of the Flandrian “hard man,” often drawing comparisons to the Spanish riders whose slower stage races take place at the same time in “easier” sunshine than the rain and mud of Belgium and northern Europe.
Print-based media
One of the principal facets of the cycling media to embrace this postmodern approach to creation and dissemination of discourse has been the print media. This essay has already stated that it was through the print-based media that cycling became a sport, and the print media remained the sport’s most important aspect until at least the 1960s, when television coverage finally became a viable, reliable alternative. (Maso, 2005:81-83).
From the offset, the construction of narratives was vital to printed representations of the young cycle sport. As a medium based around commercial motives, the aim of L’Auto and similar sports newspapers was to enthral its readers with tales of heroism so as to increase its circulation. The development of narratives was the key to attaining this goal, constructing characters and situations in which this heroism could be played out. (Maso, 2005:20-25; Dauncey & Hare, 2003:6). Indeed, the racing can often be understood as secondary to the media event: “What grips the readers of sports journals is not the progress of the race itself, but the manner in which it is described.” (Maso, 2005:20). Nigel Wynn, deputy editor of British magazine Cycling Weekly and international monthly magazine Cycle Sport (1), agrees that an appropriation of this traditional model of racing representation continues to dominate the contemporary English language print media even when under competition from other, newer forms of coverage:
People often look to the internet to get a quick update on what is happening in the world, scanning the headlines and perhaps reading a line or two of text. This allows print media to fill in the gaps, painting a much broader and hopefully more colourful picture of events rather than dry facts.
Nigel Wynn, IPC Media (Appendix 1)
Nevertheless, the accessibility of the internet means that the print media is increasingly distancing itself from covering events, favouring instead a model of
providing event coverage on our websites and providing more in-depth interviews and background features in the magazines.
Nigel Wynn, IPC Media (Appendix 1)
This distancing of the passive sequence of events in a race from cycling coverage has the drawback of allowing the print media to become positioned in a situation whereby they operate as PR-by-proxy for riders, teams and sponsors, or become embroiled in inadvertently constructing representations and myths.
Correspondingly, the influence of globalisation on the print media has had similar effects. As monthly magazines with worldwide distributions, both Cycle Sport and ProCycling are not in a position to be able to provide the same up-to-date coverage that their daily equivalents in Continental Europe can, and certainly cannot compete with the almost-instant coverage that the internet allows. Thus, the magazines have instead reappropriated the traditional model of “transforming the race into narrative” (Wille, 2003:131) into simply providing a narrative in place of the race. Features, articles and interviews drive the format, often relevant to the month’s racing but not necessarily explicitly so. Rivalries are constructed for the coming races, with the magazines usually interviewing similar types of riders in the same issue, as well as offering features on “rival” teams. Furthermore, both magazines provide “retro” sections, positing historical races through a traditional-style report of hyperbole and heroism – often these are the only race reports to be found in either magazine.
The new language of the print media is one of well written, thoughtfully considered articles that are of interest to cycling fans at the particular point in time in which it is published, yet with fundamental associations that have to be decoded and linked through the readers’ own understandings and opinions. The polysemy of the representations that the magazines construct are not new, but their postmodernised implementation is.
The role of television
By contrast, televised cycle racing has not so much adapted its coverage to meet these postmodern and global shifts as it has appropriated the adaptations made by the print media. This is not necessarily a new phenomenon, but instead an historical reference to an old one. In 1948, the Tour de France was such a suitably proud and nationalistic affair that its finish in Paris became only the second ever live outside-broadcast report on French television (Wille, 2003:132-133), occupying a similar, albeit smaller-scale, role in France as the 1953 Coronation and the launch of ITV in 1955 did in Britain in cementing television’s ability to capture the public imagination and ultimately become a necessary domestic commodity. (Whannel, 2002:34). However, it was through television coverage, or rather the lack of, that cycling’s role as a mediasport became under threat. The itinerant nature of cycling that had allowed the sport to become so closely linked to the print-based media became an obstacle for the emerging television media to overcome. Fixed cameras were unable to provide anything other than short bursts of the race, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that the technology existed to mount a television camera to a helicopter to allow it to broadcast the race’s progress (Maso, 2005:82-83; Wille, 2003:136-139) – by then too late, as easily televised stadium sports had superseded cycling’s position.
Televised coverage of cycling continued to grow despite the seemingly incompatible natures of broadcasting technology and the sport. One of the largest problems facing televised coverage was the lack of established conventions, signs and practices that could be used to dramatise the event (Wille, 2003:134). To this end, the language of the print media was employed, and it reproduced similar values and conventions. Fabien Wille argues that “we find the same heterogeneity of narratives. To effects of authenticity, the journalist explicitly added the enactment of duels. The riders thus became the actors in the story that we were being told.” (Wille, 2003:134).
These conventions matured into the distinctly narrativised style that the contemporary broadcast cycling media continues to utilise. Contemporary televised broadcasts of professional road cycling use polysemic narratives that “allow multiple and varied projections and identifications” (Wille, 2003:134), relying on commentators and editing to provide social metaphors that assemble discourses with interpretable values, and forming structures that transform the race into a spectacle akin to a theatre production with an uncertain ending (Wille, 2003:134-135). Thus, television does not require new systems of representation and narrative construction to support its images–instead, televised coverage uses its images to reinforce the credibility of the discourses its has created.
Contemporary televised coverage continues to mimic the print media. Where the print media has had cause to shift to a global model, distanced from strict race reports in favour of the discussion of cycle sport itself as the event, so too has the broadcast media, increasingly offering less of a narrative of the race, but rather a holistic narrative of the sport itself with the race only as its framing device.
Anthony McCrossan, commentator for cycling events broadcast on Cycling.tv and British Eurosport, states that the role of the commentator is to “inform, update, elaborate from knowledge, excite and involve your audience” (Appendix 2) and that it is vitally important to continue to “tell your audience what is going on.” However, he agrees that the television format is entertainment, and that straight description of the sequence of events in a given race is not what captivates audiences. Commentators therefore must discuss issues surrounding the race, including weather, locations, riders’ form and, as will be discussed in the following chapter, the race’s history. Furthermore, a significant amount of race commentary is often dedicated to the discussion of topical subjects, usually external to the event but internal to the sport, such as the Operacion Puerto doping cases of 2006. This discussion legitimates and further circulates particular discourses across the cycling media, homogenising and escalating the subjects that influence race coverage.
As a microcosm of this “vortextuality” (Whannel, 2002:206-207), in which key issues can become rapidly disseminated across aspects of public and private discourse, television stands as a strong example of the spatial compression of the English language cycling media.
The emergent “new media”
The development of internet cycle reporting has exemplified the spatial compression and expansion in scale that has typified contemporary cycle sport. Far from the idea of a media constructing cultural products whose reach is limited to within a country’s borders, the digital cycling media is distinctly more global than national. Anthony McCrossan, Commercial Director of the British based internet broadcasting television channel Cycling.tv, agrees:
Our cycling audience is now truly global and this supports the sport’s development. We have daily audiences in 130 countries. We get emails daily about where people watch and we think a global cycling community is being built here. During a live race we have Australians watching in the middle of the night, Americans having breakfast parties in their local bike shop, we even have an Eskimo who watches every race!
Anthony McCrossan, Cycling.tv (Appendix 2)
However, McCrossan does not believe this globalisation affects how Cycling.tv constructs its coverage of cycling events, arguing that
The minute you start to change to fit your audience is the day you are no longer different. Our USA audience love the fact that we are not dumbed down – we say what we see and we provide a platform for opinion.
Anthony McCrossan, Cycling.tv (Appendix 2)
Nevertheless, being different is not necessarily a concern of all aspects of the online cycling media. The pursuit of providing the “best” coverage or simply making the endeavour profitable demands some degree of concession to an audience or prospective audience, at least on a base level. Anthony McCrossan later discusses “enhancing the viewer experience” by providing particular interviews and areas of discussion at the request of his audience. Even for a British company with a largely British and American main market, the problems that face Cycling.tv in enhancing the experience of an audience that is geographically, socially and culturally divided becomes problematic. The result is that new cycling media has the choice between creating a culturally distinguishable, yet ultimately niche product, or to develop a homogenised media text with mass appeal such as CyclingNews.com. Both companies have become established success stories through operating within these two very different models. Interestingly, the primary aim of both companies is to provide the up-to-the-minute instantaneous news and coverage that is demanded of the internet, yet also pride themselves on their accessible archives of their previous products. Catering to the internet is not simply a matter of providing stories and coverage as it happens, but also ensuring that their entire media product is available on demand for prospective audiences.
This instantaneous nature of the internet has had ramifications for the print-based pillars of cycling journalism. As discussed previously in this chapter, whilst the print media is perceived to be the site of straight reports of events, the internet is increasingly stepping into this traditional role. Magazines are still considered to offer a physical record of particular races and images (Appendix 1), yet cycling fans refer instead to the internet for checking race results and, increasingly, watching broadcasted images and viewing archives of previous races, results and riders. As such, the print media relies on features, photographs and interviews rather than their traditional role as reporters. This transformation of the print media might be partly responsible for its distinct resistance to falling circulations, as too might the scepticism and incredulity towards internet published texts. People are less likely to believe everything they read and hear on the internet than they are to believe only the things that support their current views.
On-demand internet video broadcasting has yet to reach the stage where it has become a viable alternative to televised broadcasts, although the framework and surge in interest of Cycling.tv is evident of a future to come as the technology becomes commonplace. How the transient television broadcast will be able to adapt with comparable success to the physical print media is a question that will be answered over the course of the next few years.
Conclusion
This chapter has discussed the ways in which cycling and, to a greater extent, the method of production of its media have adapted to the influences of postmodernism, late capitalism and globalisation. Cycle sport is no longer the modernist crusade of technological progress and the project of the body it once was, and its media reflects this by operating as a bricolage of references, reproductions and representations, maintaining and suggesting various traditional ideologies in new ways. However, it is also worthy of attention that the globalisation that affects the media discussed is not strictly “global” in a traditional sense of the world – these media texts are largely available only in the English language, and as such tend to have the primary goal of represent the interests of English-speaking audiences. The following chapter will examine how the methods of production discussed in this chapter can influence an audience’s understandings, opinions and perceptions of cycle sport through the consumption of its media.
Footnotes
1 – Unlike continental Europe, daily multi-sport newspapers and magazines are very uncommon in Britain (Whannel, 2002:31), and even less so those that feature specific, in-depth coverage of cycle racing. Whilst newspapers occasionally provide coverage of cycling in their ample sports pages, cycling’s position as a niche sport means that this coverage is only slight, and often far from valuable to a fan of the sport. As this essay is an examination of only the specialist English language cycling media, only magazines have been analysed, and as such the methods of production discussed in this chapter and the ways in which these texts are consumed that will be discussed in the following chapter should not necessarily be assumed to correlate to newspaper coverage.