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.
INTRODUCTION
Professional road cycling is a global sport. Unlike many sports, cycling is not played out through significant national leagues and competitions (such as English football’s Premier League and FA Cup, for example), but instead through an international calendar of events. Races take place across the globe, with the recently conceived ProTour event–devised to be cycling’s own Premier League–comprising Western Europe-centred prestige races. New events such as the Tour of California and the Tour de Georgia in America have attracted significantly stronger participants and larger roadside audiences than some more established races in cycling’s traditional heartlands such as Belgium and France at the same stage of the season, and although the lure of these races might not be so much the quality of the racing as it is the warmer weather, large appearance fees for big-name riders, and pressure from team sponsors eager to reach a lucrative American market, it remains telling of cycling’s increasing globalisation. Likewise, the cycling season opens with the Tour of Langkawi in Malaysia and the Tour Down Under in Australia, two races in non-traditional cycling countries that represent an emerging market for cycle sport that has full support from the sport’s international governing body and, in the case of Australia, serves to further support a structure based around established cycling success on a national stage.
It is also noteworthy that all four of the races mentioned are prefixed by the word “Tour”, despite being anything but a “tour”. This is demonstrative of the global recognition of cycling’s flagship event, the Tour de France. In 2002, the Tour de France received 1,200 hours of broadcast coverage in Europe, 385 hours in Africa, 336 hours in America, 280 hours in Asia and 64 hours in Great Britain (Wille, 2003:129), figures that are likely to have grown in Anglophone countries and in Asia with cycling’s increased popularity in these markets in the five years that have passed. This growth of non-traditional audiences for professional road cycle racing has caused a necessary shift in the cycling media and realigned the relationships and interests of the various spheres of influence within cycle sport.
Most aspects of modern sport are defined by the complex relationships between fans, media and business interests, and these relationships affect not only the ways in which sporting events are conducted, but also how they are represented, perceived and understood. Clashes of interest are to be expected from the ways in which contemporary sport operates and, as will be examined later in this essay, these clashes have the potential to be devastating for the future of a sport when they occur. Similarly, compromises as a result of these relationships are not uncommon–for instance, football matches in Britain are regularly rescheduled so as to occupy a time slot more advantageous to television broadcasters, just as cycling’s mountain stages in stage races and important single-day races take place on a weekend to maximise viewing figures (1). These are compromises that are generally of benefit to all involved parties, although participants in both sports occasionally complain of the unnecessary physical strain such a policy can place them under. So too can business interests be subject to compromise–the long running history of bicycle manufacturers providing sponsorship and machinery for teams and individual riders has led to a process by which riders secretly rebrand their preferred bicycle with the name and colours of their official sponsor when they feel that the bicycles that their sponsor provides are inadequate. (Maso, 2005:82-85). Likewise, David Beckham’s fashion-conscious media image is in direct conflict with the image that his sponsor provides – it is unlikely that Beckham relaxes in Adidas leisurewear, but it is enough that he gives the impression that this is so.
While cycling’s relationships can be understood in the same way as those of football or rugby or cricket as creating an event that results from the constant compromise of the various interests of the parties involved in all aspects of the respective sport, the balance of this tense relationship is much more weighted towards the media in cycling than any other sport. Because road cycling is itinerant, passing long distances on public roads, its live spectatorship lacks the completeness of experience provided by a stadium sport that allows access to all the developments on the field of play. There is no alternative way for a cycling fan to follow the sequence of events other than through mediated coverage and, as Fabien Wille said of the development of mediated cycle sport, “the race’s lack of visibility thus encouraged accounts based on imagination, legend or epic.” (Wille, 2003:144).
This essay examines professional road cycling’s role as a media constructed event, and analyses how the cycling media reflects, refracts and perpetuates particular representations and myths within this construct. It is important to remember that this is a study of the contemporary English-language cycling media, and as such analyses only English-language sources from the three years that are covered by the 2004 to the 2006 racing seasons. With the rapid growth in interest in cycling in America following Lance Armstrong’s record of seven consecutive Tour de France victories from 1999-2005, as well as the continuing growth in success of riders from other Anglophone countries, the English-language cycling media is an evolving subset of the global cycling media, both developing and recycling codes and practices of coverage and representation (2). Whilst broader analyses have been conducted of the cycling media prior to 2004, there have been no academic studies of the English-language cycling media during this period of continued growth.
The aim of this essay is to provide definition of the role that the English-language cycling media plays in contemporary road cycling coverage. It makes no claims that the globalisation and commodification is a recent development, and should be understood as a critical examination, rather than a critique, of the ways in which the English-language cycling media construct meanings and representations, and the reasons why this is the case.
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.
CHAPTER TWO: STRUCTURES OF INFLUENCE – THE VALUES INHERENT IN CYCLING MEDIA TEXTS
The structures, influences and systems through which the English language cycling media produces consumable texts are intrinsically linked to the construction of meaning through systems of representation based around the construction of identities, allusion to existing perceptions, and the constant reappearance and reassertion of cycling’s historical grandeur. This equation of meaning through the mediation of particular values positions cycling as a specific site through which audiences consume not only a sequence of events or a narrativised version of a sequence of events, but also a series of ideas, principles and expectations.
These representations largely serve the purpose, as with other sports, of positing professional road cycle racing in a way that will appeal to its audience and perpetuate the sport. Whilst the motivation behind these representations is essentially capitalist, this does not necessarily apply to the representations themselves, whose underlying goal is to both construct and recycle existing understandings and beliefs in a way that can create the strongest narratives or sense of engagement with events. This chapter will examine three of the main ways through which these existing understandings and beliefs are reconstructed and recycled by the cycling media, and situate the extent to which the cycling media’s role is less about reporting events than it is constructing meanings for those events.
“English-speaking riders” and transnational identities
One of the ways in which meaning is constructed in the English language cycling media is through the means by which “English-speaking riders” are used and represented. The term itself is ambiguous – it does not refer simply to riders who can speak the English language, but instead to riders from particular Anglophone, Anglo-Saxon countries. The inference is that several countries (namely Great Britain, America, Australia, and South Africa) separated by thousands of miles have a common relationship that cannot exist with the “foreign” other of mainland Europe.
The motives behind this inference are not necessarily profit-driven – whilst markets for a homogenised global cycling coverage certainly exist, the resistance of using this term to refer to riders from other profitable Anglophone markets such as Canada and Eire suggests instead the reproduction of an Anglo-Saxon cultural identity of superiority from which the “weaker” colonies and “Celtic underdogs” are to be excluded. (Dauncey & Hare, 2003:17-18).
This transnational identity is able to exist through the models of postmodernisation and commodification of the production of cycling media texts outlined in the previous chapter:
The lesson from media sport is that whereas the rhetoric of national identity is about uncomplicated allegiance to a nation based, singly or variously, on place of residence, place of birth or parental lineage, support for a nation is in fact surprisingly provisional, and easily transferable. The indications are that the ongoing commodification and globalisation of sport is influencing the cultural and social significance of national identities.Brookes, 2002:84
Thus, the concept of national identity within sports is ephemeral, a dynamically produced constant process based around the cultural and social significances of a particular epoch. (ibid. 89). Indeed, rather than a simple cultural construction, nation can be understood as an imagined community built upon a series of “rituals, daily practices, techniques, institutions, manners and customs which enable the nation to be thinkable, inhabitable, communicable and therefore governable” (Mercer, 1992:27, cited in Brookes, 2002:86). But the malleability of national identity and its position as ritualistic community process does not necessarily imply that the role of nationalism in maintaining identities is under threat. Citing Meyrowitz, Brookes dismisses the idea that “Postmodernists argue that new communications technologies will replace place-defined collective identities with ‘communities of interest’ that have ‘no sense of place’” (Brookes, 2002:84), arguing instead that the “economics of media sport” reproduce national differences, rather than undermine them (ibid. 85).
Brookes’s dismissal of the postmodernist technological approach to understanding the relationship between communications technologies and national identities might initially seem to contradict the evidence presented so far in this essay, but to some extent this is correct. The transnational identity of the “English-speaking riders” might be a “community of interest” to an extent, but it is certainly grounded in real-world physical location. The English language cycling media’s adoption of Anglo-Saxon riders can be seen in the same way as English rugby fans are expected to support Great Britain in international tournaments, and golf fans to support Europe in the Ryder Cup. National identities in the sports media are thus “the site of competing discourses” (Brookes, 2002:106), and can shift to best represent particular values.
These constructions of transnational identity within cycle sport are thus not so much an economic decision, but rather an extension of the tendency of fans to use sports as a commodity to define the self (Ashworth, 1970:40-41). Britain’s tendency to cling to its Imperial past means that its political framework and postcolonial identity is such that the difference between its representation of sport and the ways in which sporting events are represented in continental Europe
can be explained in terms of the degree of political modernity, so that in Britain/England sporting success or failure comes to stand in for the success or failure of the nation in general, in the rest of Europe sporting success or failure is only one way of being and does not come to stand in for the nation as a whole.Brookes, 94-95
By placing extra emphasis on the worth of victory to national identity and relating it to external social values, coverage of road cycling – in which Anglo-Saxon culture is very much in the minority – demands a broader definition of national identity to provide both the results and audience support required to maintain its existence. As a result, “English-speaking riders”, an amalgam of Anglo-Saxon culture, occupy the mediated position of representing this culture in a cordon of foreign otherness.
As such, the referral to “English-speaking riders” provides a foundation from which to develop allegiances within the competing discourses of national identity (Brookes, 2002:106), offering a racialised, culturalised standpoint for the audience to take in the consumption of constructed narratives. The audience is informed which stars embody and epitomise aspects of the (trans-)national character (Whannel, 2002:166), and are thus positioned in a situation whereby they can consume the media text within a preferred reading.
The “other media”
One of the ways that this construction of an Anglo-Saxon ideology is reinforced is through the allocation of “otherness”. Unlike the findings of studies into particular sports, this otherness was rarely projected onto the participants themselves, whose existence was necessary for the construction of heroism that shaped cycling’s representation, and who continue to provide avenues for the construction of narratives. Instead, this otherness was given to two parties: the fans, and the media.
Non-Anglo-Saxon cycling fans were not characterised inherently negatively, yet their otherness remained evident in their representation through constructions of stereotypes and generalisations that did not correspond to the lack of visibility of fans from Anglophone countries. Foreign fans were thus orientalised in their representations – from the suave Italian fans depicted at the Giro d’Italia, to their zealous, passionate compatriots in the tifosi, to the French fans obsessed with national character, to the Flemings whose fondness of watching cycling, eating frites and drinking lager is so strong that it leads to them standing in adverse weather conditions. Their otherness is exemplified through the shallow, generalised communities of identity that represent them in comparison to the solid, innate bond that represents Anglo-Saxon fans.
However, it is the media itself that is often the most constructed “other”. Reports of important cycling news from French and Spanish newspapers – whose position as the media in countries where cycling is not a niche sport can allow them to investigate much more comprehensively than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts – are often discussed within the English language cycling media, but afforded very little credibility. L’Equipe’s 2005 front-page article “The Armstrong Lie” was met with incredulity by the English language cycling media and, as a telling indication of how the media’s representations can shape perceptions, was also dismissed by most Anglo-Saxon cycling fans, the majority of whom lacked access to the text itself. Detractors argued that L’Equipe was in the business of selling newspapers, a claim that was certainly truthful although far from a solid basis for argument – L’Equipe being in the business of selling newspapers is no more evidence as to their lying as Armstrong being in the business of winning Tours de France would be evidence of his cheating. Further criticisms levelled at L’Equipe were to the credibility of their argument, describing the article as the result of a French vendetta against America, and accusing the newspaper of trying to force the Union Cycliste International and World Anti-Doping Agency into taking action against Armstrong on the basis of the article. The extent to which the article has credibility is difficult to gauge, especially given that the case in question was not officially investigated to a significant degree, but the inference of lack of journalistic ethics and the extent to which the issue became racialised, nationalised and politicised in the English language media should not be ignored. Nor should the fact that many of the criticisms that were made with the intention of disparaging L’Equipe’s reporting are alluded to in the very article itself:
However, these latter conclusions could be hasty, as the American has never tested positive since anti-doping controls of the 2000 Tour. And, paradoxically enough, this affair should have no disciplinary consequences. The retrospective analyses … have in fact been done with the use of the B-samples from the 1999 samples, which were all negative … and very few sample residues were left … Furthermore, the B-samples were only used for experimental analysis and the procedures followed don’t correspond with requirements set by the anti-doping procedures … There won’t be any counterexpertise, nor any statutory consequences, as the defendant’s rights can’t be respected.”L’Equipe, August 23, 2005
The non-Anglophone press is thus prescribed the traditional values of otherness, the same values that are so often inflicted upon various social others, be they based on gender, class or race – the media is portrayed as untrustworthy, irrationally guided by its own subjective opinions and willing to break traditional rule structures. That the criticisms levelled at the non-Anglophone cycling media are largely invalid or immeasurable is secondary to the connotations constructed by the projection of deviance upon a generalised, foreign “institution” of “otherness”.
This “otherness” is not simply reserved for the non-English language media, however. The Times newspaper was dismissed in the cycling press for its decision to publish extracts of the book L.A. Confidentiel. (The Times, June 2004). The media maintained the pressure against The Times, an aspect of the media outside to the sport, when Lance Armstrong, the subject of the extract in question, sued the newspaper for libel. This ostracisation of the outside media is a long standing tradition of the cycling media (Maso, 2005), and the new Anglo-Saxon media cliques have appropriated this in their contemporary practice.
Likewise, the American Floyd Landis, who was briefly the winner of the 2006 Tour de France before testing positive for exogenous testosterone, mounted a large-scale PR campaign within the three pillars of the cycling media protesting his innocence and complaining of being the victim of a “trial by media”. That his campaign used the very media he was complaining about was of little consequence, instead there was posited a dangerous, amoral media of which he was a victim. This other media was not a physical entity, and nor did it need to be – it was enough to suggest an objectified otherness, an enemy within from which he and other Anglo-Saxon riders were under threat.
Traditional values: Cycling’s heritage
Despite the postmodern shifts described in the previous chapter, the English language cycling media does largely promote cycling’s proud heritage and long-standing traditions and values. The worth of a heritage of mythical riders, inspiring, exciting races and the incredible strain of the hardest sport on earth is not a difficult one to place – it is typical and vital for mediasport to utilise its symbiosis to reassert its value to fans.
The grandeur of cycling is constantly asserted through the English language media. Magazines regularly feature “retro” features, discussing events from races that have usually taken place more than twenty years prior to publishing. Furthermore, it is habitual to refer to particular events with allusion to other, previous events – Floyd Landis’s stage win in the 2006 Tour de France was compared with the “greats” of cycling history, notably Koblet and Coppi of 1951 and 1949/1952 respectively; the Operacion Puerto drugs case of 2006 was related to the ‘Festina Affair’ of 1998; the Giro d’Italia’s crossing of the Colle delle Finestre in 2005 was represented with sepia-toned television coverage to further assert its relationship to cycling’s “golden days.”
These references provide constant reminders as to the current value of the sport. By relating particular current events to an illustrious, romanticised past, a sense of ‘making history’ is constructed – simply, audiences will engage more with the sport if there is a perceived potential to see the development of the next of these ‘classic rides’. The English language media’s fascination with presenting contemporary cycling as a constantly developing sport making its own position in historical representations is further alluded to by Eurosport’s television coverage, whose presenters are prompted to explicitly refer to viewers who are “watching cycling for the first time.” Whilst it is true that such viewers might exist for the Tour de France, it is unlikely that the numbers of non-cycling audiences tuning into Eurosport in anticipation of the ENECO Tour of Benelux would be so significant as to warrant the dedication of airtime to explain the rules of the sport. Instead, this reference implies that there are, indeed, rapidly growing numbers of new audiences for cycle sport, and furthermore allows aficionados of the sport a position in which their knowledge of cycling culture is something that maps them out from other fans. As well as maintaining audience interest, the idea that particular fans have arrived too late to witness the events that other cycling fans have throughout their time spent following the sport adds further value to these events that can now only be experienced retrospectively, and therefore incompletely. Essentially, by appealing to memory, the process invents – or perhaps imposes – tradition through a symbolic dimension.
This is not a new phenomenon. Cycle sport has used the media to invent its own tradition since the beginning of the twentieth century. The first Tour de France in 1903 used a route that mapped out a very particular geography of France, designed to instil memory and nostalgia. (Dauncey & Hare, 2003:8). Through the mediation of this race, a series of rules and conventions were devised, constructing a culture for the Tour and inventing its tradition (ibid). The extent to which tradition is constructed can be seen in the example of the Tour’s “first” mountain, the Ballon d’Alsace. In fact, the Tour’s director, Henri Desgrange, included the mountain in an attempt to find new ways to make the Tour continue to be considered the hardest race for its competitors. That the 1903 and 1904 Tours de France climbed the Col de la République, only seventeen metres lower than the Ballon did not stop L’Auto from presenting this move as unprecedented and dangerous. (Maso, 2005:21-22). Not only is this mountain recorded as the first in virtually all histories of the Tour, but the 2004 Tour de France route also paid its own homage by crossing it. The heritage constructed by Henri Desgrange in 1905 to increase the public’s perception of the brutality of the Tour remains evident in the media today.
The contemporary English language cycling media continues to support the construction of heritage. Like the media of old, it reinforces the tradition of events and situations that would otherwise be considered new. However, it also affords particular values to sites of Anglo-Saxon successes – the Col de Madone, for example, is referred to in the same breath as the “legendary” mountains in cycle sport largely because Lance Armstrong annually used it to train his climbing ability ready for the Tour de France.
By constructing a heritage for cycle sport, the ephemeral nature of mediasport becomes more “real”, and presents a history and culture that can be used as a background for the creation, dissemination and legitimisation of mediated representations and meanings.
Conclusion
The English language cycling media translates the system of production discussed in the previous chapter into a highly structured, self-perpetuating system built around the construction of narrativised discourses of representation and implicit signifiers of particular meanings.
Through the construction of an Anglo-Saxon identity, the media is able to embody and situate an audience’s preferred reading through a system of pre-existing values and connotations. It is telling that “the fundamental generative principles of ‘French’ sporting characteristics are to be discovered in the interactions between French and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture.” (Dauncey & Hare, 2003:17). Cycling media from non-Anglophone nations too, it would appear, use nationalistic and cultural “difference” as a tool from which to define identity.
This difference is also a tool through which other connotations can be made. Cycling fans from non-Anglophone nations are presented with a jovial representation as a wild and outrageous other; the foreign media less so. So too do other aspects of cycling use otherness as a defining tool, such as the example of Floyd Landis attempting to gain public support by playing off public concerns about a renegade, unethical media capable of diminishing reputations, presenting a dangerous other as a simple threat from which to recover.
The importance of “heritage” to cycling is one of the most significant ways in which meaning is attached to particular events. The cycling media’s fascination with representations of the past and the positioning of the present in relation to it is not necessarily unique, but certainly contrasts with more ubiquitous sports such as football, in which the emphasis is placed largely on the future, which teams will win which competitions. The cycling media recognise the worth of a strongly represented tradition, a system “imposed from above” that consists of a “set of practices dedicated to inculcating and exemplifying values of historical unity that stress continuity and solidarity despite profound social change.” (Rowe, McKay & Miller, 1998:123).
Ultimately, by focusing on these key spheres of influence rather than attempting a comprehensive survey of production methods, we can better understand how the cycling media prepares its texts for audience consumption.
CONCLUSION
The essay has analysed the ways in which the English language cycling media has adapted to technological, economic and communicative advancements to develop a unique postmodern method of production across the three key aspects of its media, while maintaining a symbiotic relationship. Because fans cannot easily follow the itinerant nature of professional road cycling in person, this mediation becomes vital, leading to a reliance on the printed word, live or edited coverage, or the new media’s instant news services. The postmodern reconstruction of traditional techniques serves to benefit the formation of narratives. This is particularly true in the print media, which, having come under threat first from the broadcast media weakening the imaginary dimension of cycle sport in the 1960s and 1970s (Maso, 2005:97; Wille, 2003:142) and then by the new media constructing a more easily accessible form of the written word in the 2000s, increasingly provides a narrativisation of the entire sport itself, its participants and its history rather than simply translating races into narrative events. Television itself has developed its own practices by appropriating the literal techniques of the traditional print media, something that it continues to do, and the contemporary English language broadcast media frequently serves as a means through which to disseminate and escalate specific discourses regarding the sport’s narrativisation, particularly through the use of the commentator, whose role is at least as much about providing discussion and context as it is about describing a sequence of events. In terms of physical coverage, the televised media, with its multiple cameras providing the viewer with an inimitable position through which to consume the race, offers a perspective of the cycling event that simply cannot be experienced in any other way (Wille, 2003:133). Similarly, the internet serves as a system through which both print and televised media are reconstituted, developing a distanced, globalised version of both. The success of its instantly accessible news and coverage is its compensation for the sacrifices of character it has to make to provide this service, and yet nevertheless it has to be balanced with an archive of previous reporting and broadcasts that is available on demand to its audience. As new media technologies become increasingly accessible, this postmodern system of production will continue to reinvent itself. Crucially, the texts produced under this shifting system do not just report on the sport; they actively construct its representation.
This representation is exemplified by the transnational identity produced to situate coverage from a particular viewpoint. The construction of an encompassing Anglo-Saxon identity to be defined by the way in which it interacts with continental European culture not only provides a basis for nationalistic fan support, but also posits cycle sport within racialised terms, situating events in a cultural, social and historical context that has reach far beyond sport. This is further evident in the way that the English language cycling media uses otherness. By Orientalising cycling fans that live beyond their sphere of influence and tagging the foreign cycling media as deviant and untrustworthy, a degree of visibility is attached to groups of people who exist outside of Anglo-Saxon culture. The media creates a further system of reference through the emphasis it places on the sport’s heritage. By referring to its history using the terms of a literary epic and consistently positioning contemporary events in relation to this, the grandeur of the sport is expressed and the perception of contemporary cycle racing as being a growing part of this illustrious history is created. Thus, “the sports establishment does not operate as an apolitical, asocial enterprise, but as part of the larger society. As such, sports are not an alternative to ‘real life,’ but a reflection of the racist economic and social system that supports them (Majors, 1990:113).” Cycling’s position as a niche sport in the countries represented by the media analysed in this essay might challenge this statement, but nevertheless the English language cycling media is not to be understood as simply a model based around reflection of a sequence of events, but instead an active site for the construction of meaning.
Further Study
It is important to understand that this text is an examination of the English language cycling media and makes no allusions as to the extent to which the meanings constructed by this media can influence its audience. The example of riders from Anglophone countries whose fame and level of coverage extends much beyond their talent demonstrates clearly that the media does not simply reflect public interest, but also influences it – that the American Tom Danielson can be regularly touted by fans as a favourite for the Grand Tours, cycling’s most demanding and prestigious races, despite scarce evidence of his ability to perform to a competitive level in such events beyond the media’s influence, should be considered an example of this phenomenon. However, whilst it is certain that the media affects the ways in which people consume and understand cycle sport, there are examples that suggest the influence is not simply a top-down model – people are capable of constructing their own readings of texts. The example of public disdain for doping stories and the continued audience figures for races presented as being devalued by doping issues (Maso, 2005:141; a resilience reflected in the record-breaking television audiences of the late 1990s and early 2000s) demonstrates that not only are the sport’s fans resistant to the dictation of values, but also that the cycling media can be out of touch with the audience whose interests it claims to represent. Considering audience reception of these media texts would thus be both interesting and useful in developing an understanding of the effects of cycling media texts. Qualitative and quantitative audience studies would provide an ethnographic aspect to further studies into this subject, and would highlight the extent to which these representations are received and whether they are reproduced in the perceptions and behavioural practices of fans within and outside of representations of cycle sport.