Brazilian School Games: A globalized model for school sports policy

Abstract

The aim of this article was to analyze the model of Brazilian School Games (BSG) developed from 2005 to 2017 under management of the Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil (COB)). The research used document analysis, and an interview as supplementary data. The initial categories adopted were the cultural flows that characterize the development and globalization process proposed by Appadurai. From analyzing the data we affirm that the BSG, in the investigated period, presented a globalized structure for the development of school sports, perceived by all of Appadurai’s flows—ethnic, media, technological, financial and ideological—and given the history and position of the COB in national and international sports fields, it had a key role in consolidating this globalized perspective.

Keywords

globalization Brazilian Olympic Committee public policy school sports youth sport

Introduction

Together, globalization and sport set up a topic of broad interest and discussion in the sociology of sport. Although there are several definitions for the concept, globalization, in general, can be understood as a process that transcends the boundaries of nation-states (Appadurai, 1996; Maguire, 2000), transforming and intensifying the world’s cultural interactions and transactions (Appadurai, 1996).

The development and diffusion of modern sport, in the early eighteenth century, are clearly global processes (Maguire, 2005). Giulianotti and Robertson affirm that “the globalization of sport ‘took off’ from the 1870s onwards, as the ‘games revolution’” (Giulianotti and Robertson, 2007b: 108), and, nowadays, there is no doubt about the global reach of sport (Giulianotti and Robertson, 2007b; Maguire, 2005). Graeff (2020) clarifies that transnational capital gave rise to an international and then transnational, and global economy, which, in turn, has significantly altered the production and distribution of goods and services, including sport, as well as the structure and movement of capital and its accumulation aspects. However, besides realizing that, it is important to assess the impact of global sport on people, nations and civilizations around the world (Maguire, 2005).

Observing the context of Brazilian sports, in recent years, the Brazilian School Games (BSG)¹ have been impacted by a globalized model of sport. In order to understand this, we need to know that national school sports competitions are traditional events in Brazil. They were established in 1969, during military dictatorship and until 2004 were managed by the Brazilian government.

From 2005 to 2017 (and even today), the Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil (COB)) in partnership with the Ministry of Sport (from 2019, Ministry of Sport became the Special Secretary of Sports), and Globo Organizations (GO) (the main broadcaster in Brazil), and financed (primarily) by public funds (Agnelo/Piva Law, 10.264/2001), created a new project that was first called School Olympics and then Youth School Games. Even though “BSG are more than 50 years old, a new project is created, called School Olympics” (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil) Agent, 2016). This new project is now “100% managed by COB in another format, with other qualities, conditions, in short, other forms of selection and partnership with Globo Organizations and Ministry of Sport” (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil)Agent, 2016).

Regarding the BSG from 2005, Tubino affirmed “in a critical analysis of innovations, [that] it can be said that there was a modernization in terms of School Sports” (Tubino, 2010: 138). Although this analysis is limited, presenting only descriptions of the new model, Tubino (2010) employed the idea of “modernization”, a concept that appeared in the first studies on the subject of sport and globalization (Bale and Maguire, 1994; Donnelly, 1996).

Taking into account the above context, this study analyses the BSG model developed from 2005 to 2017 under the management of the COB. We employ the theoretical background from Appadurai (1996), especially the global cultural flows, to ask whether the BSG structure shows signs of a globalized pattern within Brazilian school sports. Appadurai (1996) affirms that a current global economy is marked by its complexity and has to do with economy, culture and politics. For Appadurai this was explored through the relationship of five dimensions of global cultural flows or “scapes” discussed below. The suffix “scape” indicates deeply perspectival constructs based on the context of each actor involved and not objectively given relations.

By document analysis, and interviews providing supplementary data, we unveil the ongoing social transformation that has happened within Brazilian schools’ sports system in the past 12 years. The work hopes to foster and contribute to discussions about globalization of the Olympic Movement, and its influence on Brazilian public policies in school sports.

Globalization and sport

The first studies of “Globalization and Sport” appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Donnelly, 1996; Maguire, 2015), and described the processes of Americanization, cultural imperialism and modernization of sport (Bale and Maguire, 1994; Donnelly, 1996). As precursor studies, Maguire cites Elias (1986) and Heinilä (1982), and nowadays there is a vast literature, “our contemporary knowledge concerning sport and globalization rests on a range of scientific establishments, orthodoxies and hegemonic theories, but we must remain open to the unanticipated and, even, the improbable” (Maguire, 2015: 520).

Dunning (2010) advocates the analyses of sport and globalization in a long-term social process and Maguire (1999, 2005), also drawing on Norbert Elias, examines how globalization changes the nature of sport and discusses broader global civilizing processes. Giulianotti and Brownell (2012) problematize the creation of transnational society and the contribution of Olympic sport in this process. Giulianotti and Robertson (2004, 2007a, 2012), address “glocalization” in football and its possibilities for cultural continuity, and offer a sociological model based on a theory of “global field” that can be utilized to study different fields in reference to globalization. Jarvie et al. (2008), in turn, point to relations between the economic and commercial potential of China and the development of sport events, and Rowe (2011) questions sport as an ideal cultural institution to express globalization, highlighting nationalism as a central element in sport.

We also highlight MacIntosh et al. (1993), who recognize the nature of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as a “transnational organization” and alert us to the surveillance of “transnational interactions” between this non-governmental entity and national governments, and Maguire and Stead (1998), who address globalization from the processes of migration of athletes in football, also show how the processes of globalization fosters the internationalization of the transfer market in this modality. Similarly, Magnússon (2001) deals with athletes’ migration in addition to highlighting the flow of coaches.

For this article Olympism, which according to Giulianotti and Robertson (2007b) has a global political reach, provides a relevant background. “Accelerated development mantra”, “Olympic Spirit” (Gaffney, 2010), “legacy”, “Olympics tsunami” (Armour and Dagdas, 2012), “franchise model” (Boykoff, 2011; Johal, 2010 apud Boykoff, 2011; Maharaj, 2015) and “islands of excellence” (Curi et al., 2011) are some expressions used to understand how the Olympic movement works in the sporting and political context, especially around the promotion of sporting mega-events (when, according to Giulianotti and Robertson (2007b), the transnational status of sport is revealed), ignoring social realities and problems. Giulianotti and Brownell affirm that sport can stimulate globalization by drawing people and groups or countries and cities into transnational contact and also “by enhancing public imagining and experience of the world through global sport events” (Giulianotti and Brownell, 2012: 203). As “globalized fables” (Seoane and Tadei, 2002), the IOC mobilizes public money to achieve private gains (Gaffney, 2010) – in 2008, this total revenue was US$2.4 billion (Boykoff, 2011).

Another aspect inherent to the Olympic Movement is Olympic Education, which involves educators, children and youth, and is directly related to the idea of legacy: “either way, the organizers are determined to ensure that everyone will be sprinkled with Olympic legacy dust” (Armour and Dagdas, 2012: 261). In a critical analysis about programmes devoted to children and youth, Gaffney affirms that they “aimed at developing disciplined minds and bodies are wraped in a global political economy of sports that serves, in part, to exacerbate instead of ameliorate social and spatial inequalities” (Gaffney, 2010: 26).

Global processes, sport and Appadurai’s flows

Especially for this study, we are mainly interested in the work of Appadurai (1996), which states that there are two central elements – interconnected and diacritical – which identify the break with the past giving rise to modern, globalized society: media and migration. This theory, which he calls the theory of rupture, takes these two elements and explores their joint effects on “work of imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity” (Appadurai, 1996: 3). For him, imagination is a social practice, it is a social fact, and it is a central element in the new global order, because it directs human action.

Theoretical models that discuss trade balance, migration theories, center–periphery, consumers and producers and even the most complex flexible theory of global development from the Marxist tradition are inadequate to analyze current global cultural economy (Appadurai, 1996). The current global economy is marked by being complex, overlapping and disjunctive, in economic, cultural and political terms.

Then, Appadurai (1996) proposes five flows, which mark social changes, to understand this new societal dynamic: (a) ethnoscapes refers to international movement of people, whether as tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles or guest workers around the globe; (b) technoscapes refers to technology present on a global scale, whether high or low, mechanical or informational, that moves rapidly across previously inaccessible borders; (c) financescapes refers to global provision of capital that is faster and more mysterious, and difficult to keep up with such as money markets, stock exchanges, and commodity speculations; (d) mediascapes refers to the production and distribution of images and information between countries, whether by television, newspaper, magazines, Internet, video, radio, and that produce a diversity of narratives, rhetorics and ethnoscapes, and is closely related to the idea of ideoscapes; and (5) ideoscapes also refers to a concatenation of images, but is more related to politics, to state ideologies, and involves ideas such as freedom, welfare, rights, representation, democracy and sovereignty.

The displacements of these flows and the fluid interaction between them stimulate a new relationship between production and consumption of sport in globalized society. Therefore, commodity fetishism (from Marxist theory) is replaced by production fetishism and consumer fetishism (Appadurai, 1996). This means that forces present all over the world and which dynamize the production of sport, for instance, are masked/disguised and the sports consumer is transformed as a result of the flow of goods and the media flows of sport, into a sign of producer and creator, when, at best, the consumer is a person that merely chooses (Appadurai, 1996).

To our knowledge, the first work that applied Appadurai’s framework to sport, was Bale and Maguire (1994), who identified the flows in the development of sport at the end of the twentieth century. From the concept of “ethnoscape” they discuss sports labor migration as a feature of sports development in the 1980s. Besides this, we found more recent studies that analyzed the globalization of soccer, such as: Ben-Porat and Ben-Porat (2004), who studied the development of Israeli soccer, combining an analysis of the local/global relationship and three flows: capital; labor; and culture; Poli (2010), who dealt with the international flow of players generated by soccer; and May (2019), who demonstrated the relationship of an English soccer club under the ownership of a Chinese investment vehicle, showing the complexity of capital flows inside and outside of soccer clubs.

Methodology

The study used document analysis. The documents consulted were: (a) 14 versions of the BSG’s official regulations (from years 2006, 2007, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014: regulations of age groups 12 to 14 years and 15 to 17 years; from years 2008 and 2010: regulations of age group 12 to 14 years); (b) the COB’s financial reports referring to the values received by Law 10.264/2001 (Agnelo/Piva Law) in the period studied; and (c) Youth School Games Magazine (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil), 2013), which provides an overview of the BSG from 2005 to 2013.

Interviews were conducted that supplemented the principal method. The interview was conducted with a representative of the COB (called “COB Agent”), who participated from the beginning of the consolidation process of the new model of the BSG. The respondent is male and was a top officer of the BSG in the period from 2005 to 2017. The first contact was made by e-mail, when the respondent agreed to participate. A semi-structured interview was conducted in 2016 in one session by the researchers themselves at a previously scheduled location and time, lasted 67 minutes and 30 seconds, and was recorded using a voice recorder from a Sony computer.

We read the documents to identify the nature of the information. Then, we coded the documents, based on the flows/landscapes proposed by Appadurai (1996): financial (document “b”); ethnic and ideological (document “c”); technological (document “a” and “c”); and media (document “a”). Finally, in the second reading, the information was extracted from the documents and organized based on the adopted flows. The interview was transcribed in full. For analysis we also organized the content in categories derived from Appadurai’s concepts/flows, taking into account the guidelines of Alves and da Silva (1992), about the research problem and the formulations of the conceptual approach adopted. The contents from interview were introduced to reinforce the data in the documents.

In the discussion, in addition to Appadurai (1996), we used other research that discussed sport from the perspective of globalization to broaden the analysis. The research was approved by a University Ethics Committee, respecting ethical standards of research and preserving the respondent’s identity.

A globalized model for the BSG

Under management of the COB, the BSG gathered approximately 8000 students per year, organized in two age groups (12 to 14 years and 15 to 17 years), who competed in 15 sports (but nowadays only 14). Besides the number of participants, and age group competitions, another “innovation” proposed by the COB (from 2005) was that state delegations (composed of students from different schools) were replaced by state school delegations, but only for team sports. Also, a Social Center is installed where, during breaks, participants can play electronic or popular games (e.g. table soccer), learn about different sports (e.g. rugby) or play sports they already compete in (e.g. table tennis), and have access to the Internet, the COB library and information centers (e.g. nutritional and doping information) (these observations were made by the researcher during the 2014 BSG in Londrina/Parana/Brazil).

BSG and sporting financescapes

In terms of financial flow, there is a transit of resources from both private (some international) and public sources. The amount of private money invested by sponsors was not found. It is only known, according to the BSG’s official regulations, that the COB took care of issues related to licensing, marketing and merchandising of the BSG. Its official agency “Olympo Marketing and Licensing” was mentioned in 2007, 2008 and 2010 as responsible for commercial matters. From 2007 to 2013 there is no mention of official sponsors of the BSG, but only in 2007 is mentioned – Olympikus (shoes and sports goods), Oi (telecommunications), Caixa Econômica Federal (public bank), Petrobrás (oil production) and Sadia (refrigerated food) – that had exclusivity in their respective commercial segments.

In 2014, Coca-Cola became a “master” sponsor, and the brand could be used by Brazilian states, during qualifiers of state games. Those states which adhere to the “COB/Coca-Cola” commercial agreement, would comply with commercial rules of the BSG, and no commercial association could be formed with competing brands of the official sponsors. Coca-Cola has been a sponsor of the Olympic Games since 1928, and the contract with the IOC extends until 2020 (Soares and Vaz, 2009). The “IOC/Coca-Cola” association is linked to a globalization process in which multinational companies, especially since 1970, have sought a fusion between culture and market, investing in advertising, maximizing sales and transforming their products to tastes that transcend local cultures (Soares and Vaz, 2009).

The list of sponsors also included international companies, Nike, Samsung, Visa, Atos, Dow Chemicals, General Electric, McDonald’s, Omega, Panasonic, Procter & Gamble, Nissan, Ernst & Young, and Brazilian companies Skol (beer), Bradesco, Bradesco Seguros (financial and insurance services), Embratel, Claro (telecommunications), Sadia (refrigerated food) and Batavo (food). Besides the case of Coca-Cola, many of “the Olympic Partners” mentioned above have established partnerships since 1984 (McDonald’s, Dow Chemicals, Visa, and Panasonic), when the “Reagan Olympics” set a televised, globalized and sponsored trend (Boykoff, 2011).

As Appadurai affirms, financescape, as the disposition of global capital “is now a more mysterious, rapid, and difficult landscape to follow than ever before” (Appadurai, 1996: 34), and also relates to ethnoscapes and technoscapes, constrainting or moving each other. According to the Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil) Agent:

[. . .] as the Panamerican Games was in 2007 [in Rio de Janeiro], we also had to give visibility to the sponsors. When there is a lot of advance in the definition of a headquarters, there is no way to give visibility except by activating, and activation costs money. One of the tools we also used, because we did several preparatory events for the Pan American Games in 2005, 2006 and 2007, were the School Games to promote the brands of the sponsors of the Pan American Games. As it is now happening, Coca-Cola is inside the School Games, so it did not wait for 2016 to make its activation, it has been with us since 2013 or so, 2014, activating the Coca-Cola brand within Youth. (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil) Agent, 2016)

Brand activation is linked to a communication project with the public/crowd, and involves “the protection of stakeholder interests within the spatial confines of a public spectacle” (Eisenhauer et al., 2014). These companies endeavor to achieve awareness and recognition by potential consumers, so that they can also feel part of it. The choice of the target audience and forms of interaction are fundamental. In 2014, Coca-Cola was present in the Social Center of the BSG, offering several activities/games (such as climbing and Street Dance via Xbox, and free Powerade® drink), supporting the Opening Ceremony, and so offering different experiences/products (Eisenhauer et al., 2014). The relationship between financial flow and sponsors also carries ideological flows, since through this relationship ideologies and models of doing and practicing sports are also conveyed. Bale and Maguire state that the financial flow also occurs “on the marketing of sport along specific, that is, American, lines” (Bale and Maguire, 1994: 6).

Public funding represents the largest amount that the COB provides to develop the BSG. Public funding comes from the lottery, and it is regulated by Agnelo/Piva Law (No. 10.264/2001). The law was defended as necessary mainly because it would guarantee the preparation of athletes and parathletes for (future) Olympic Games. At the time, this law was described by Arthur Nuzman (2003) as “the redemption of sport” .

Based on that law, 2% of the gross revenues from federal lotteries, less the prizes, would be passed on: 85% to COB; and 15% to CPB (Brazilian Paralympic Committee). From 2015 (after approval in Brazilian Law for Inclusion of the Person with Disability), lottery collection increased to 2.7%, and proportions changed to 67.96% and 37.04% to COB and CPB, respectively. Also, according to the law, of the total amount received by COB and CPB, 10% should be invested in school sports.

From 2013 (Decree 7.984), the resource/public funding has been shared (at least 50%) with the Brazilian Confederation of School Sports. After consulting financing reports (that detail the resources from Agnelo/Piva law, from 2001 to 2017), we have gathered information on the values passed on, with percentage increase and simulation according to the National Broad Consumer Price Index (IPCA – Índice Nacional de Preços ao Consumidor Amplo) (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Financial resources for school sports received by COB by Agnelo/Piva Law, its percentage increase and simulation of readjustment based on inflation index (IPCA – Índice Nacional de Preços ao Consumidor Amplo).

Year	Annual transfer to school sports (R$/Brazilian Currency)	Annual transfer to school sports(US$*)	Percentageincrease overprevious year(%)	Accumulatedinflation(IPCA) in theyear (%)	Simulationin case of readjustment by IPCA**	Simulationin case of readjustmentby IPCA(US$)
2001	1.740.000,00***	740.299,52	–	–	–
2002	5.079.205,21	1.738.739,29	191.9	–	–
2003	5.580.738,21	1.812.928,63	9.9	9.3	5.551.571,30	1.803.453,63
2004	7.004.509,46	2.393.967,48	25.5	7.6	6.004.874,31	2.052.317,00
2005	7.055.026,65	2.897.103,58	0.7	5.7	7.403.766,50	3.040.311,47
2006	6.746.627,56	3.100.329,75	–4.4	3.1	7.273.732,48	3.342.554,33
2007	8.495.690,59	4.361.461,36	25.9	4.5	7.050.225,80	3.619.398,22
2008	9.193.165,66	5.010.991,86	8.2	5.9	8.676.562,43	4.729.402,83
2009	11.347.729,06	5.680.681,35	23.4	4.3	9.193.169,96	4.602.107,51
2010	14.270.468,17	8.106.838,70	25.8	5.9	12.017.245,07	6.826.816,49
2011	15.694.843,75	9.370.055,97	10.0	6.5	15.198.048,60	9.073.461,85
2012	16.593.821,97	8.489.625,48	5.7	5.8	16.605.144,69	8.495.418,34
2013	18.396.267,41	8.526.264,09	10.9	5.9	17.572.857,47	8.144.631,75
2014	21.854.742,57	9.286.454,73	18.8	6.4	19.573.628,52	8.317.170,27
2015	24.475.211,12	7.346.603,97	12.0	10.7	24.193.199,53	7.261.953,93
2016	20.832.680,65	5.969.078,44	–14.9	6.3	26.397.139,53	7.563.433,58
2017	21.988.871,37	6.888.744,16	5.5	3.0	21.457.661,07	6.722.324,90

Notes: * exchange rate based on the annual average value of the dollar in Brazil (www.ipeadata.gov.br); ** IPCA, Broad National Consumer Price Index. The adjustment was calculated based on the financial resources received in the previous year and the IPCA of the current year; and *** in 2001, the financial resources corresponded to the months of August to December.

Source: https://www.cob.org.br/pt/cob/documentos/demonstracoes-financeiras/

Based on the data in Table 1, it is noted that there were decreases in the receipt of values in 2006 (-4.4%) and 2016 (-14.9%), while in the other years, the COB received amounts always higher than the previous year and always rising above inflation. These data connect to the globalization movement. Since the Olympic Movement is a global brand, the connection occurs through the investment of the national state/local economy and the transfer of national/local values to global nature organizations (Curi et al., 2011). The mobility of capital to large global corporations may also weaken local sports manifestations (Donnelly, 1996; Lee and Maguire, 2009), creating further tension, in the case of Brazil, in the relationship between public funding (and we did not cover the public resources coming from state and local governments) and the private execution of sport. That was possible, in part, because of the sporting ideoscapes involved, as presented in the next subsection.

BSG and sporting ideoscapes

During the BSG, the chain of ideas, terms, and images are expressed by, in and through sport, based, especially, on the model of high performance and Olympic sport, strengthening the Olympic Movement as a whole. We understand that the COB, through the BSG, used the same mechanisms adopted by the IOC in the dissemination of Olympic ideology, that is the “sense access”, as mentioned by Macintosh et al.:

Neither the ideology of Olympism nor the sporting spectacle of the Olympic Games requires political, social, or economic accord among the Olympic members. Rather, the IOC attempts to globalize its ideology in two ways. It gains access to various “member” countries through its respective NOCs, and through the staging of the Olympic Games. This access and the perceived need among nation states for the globalized Olympic product has been greatly enhanced through the worldwide televising of the Games. (Macintosh et al., 1993: 375)

The argument used by the COB about participation in the BSG was that it reinforces the possibility of participation in other sporting events promoted by the IOC or by institutions affiliated to it, thus establishing a relationship between participation in school games and access to another sporting events (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Infographic that shows the participation of the Brazilian School Games’ former athletes in Youth Olympic Games.

For the COB, the BSG’s main objective is to guarantee the “sport pyramid”, that is, the maintenance of the highest sports level by the lowest. This is also perceived in the process of choosing the modalities that will be contested in the BSG. According to the Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil) Agent (2016), there is a dialogue with the high performance area of the COB to make these decisions and define the sports that will be part of the BSG program, because there is a current scenario of mobility that provides potential for the Olympic Games and also sports that are under development.

Analyzing the testimony of the Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil) Agent (2016), we refer to Bourdieu (1996), when he states that there is a reason for the agents’ actions, and that their actions are not free. Bourdieu (1996) argues that there is an ontological complicity between mental and social structures (objectives), what he calls interest (illusion) in the game. Thus, the reason why the agents mobilize must be discovered, in order to “transform a series of apparently incoherent, arbitrary conducts into a coherent series, into something that can be understood from a single principle or a coherent set of principles” (Bourdieu, 1996: 138).

In light of this, it is worth highlighting the sports spokespersons present during the BSG. The “BSG ambassadors” play a crucial role, participating in the BSG and taking the Olympic experience, and promoting the ecology program agenda of the COB as an example to be followed (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil), 2013).

Thus, among the competitors, the ambassadors transmit “a little of their experiences as top athletes. [. . .] usually participate in cultural and sporting activities, in addition to meeting requests for photos and autographs of those who may become their possible successors” (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil), 2013: 10) (see Figure 2). The COB also organizes visits by the ambassadors to public and private schools in the host city during the BSG. These are related to “legacy” and “Olympic education”, as pointed out and criticized by Armour and Dagdas (2012), affirming that all host cities are involved in the Olympic education strategy. These findings can also be related to the work of Cornelissen (2011), who found that programs promoted by global sport corporations do not bring about significant change in the sports structure of the country, but only promote the “brand” and private interests. As we shall subsequently see, there were different programs that promoted ethnic flow and at the same time reinforced the “Olympic brand’.

Figure 2.

Brazilian School Games’ ambassadors: Judoka Sarah Menezes (left); boxer Adriana Araújo and beach volleyball player Alison Conte Cerutti (center); and gymnast Angélica Kvieczynski (right).

BSG and sporting ethnoscapes

We consider that this flow begins in 2005, when the COB became the main organizer of the BSG (in part because of the Agnelo/Piva Law). Later, the COB facilitated the transit of foreigners within the BSG, a kind of migration that is seen in the participation of students, sport coaches and observers from other countries.

The COB promoted the transit of people through the “Brazilian Congress of School Sports”, a scientific event which targeted sport coaches and physiotherapists, who participated in the BSG. Among the international coaches, we highlight Spanish handball coach Jordi Ribeira and Danish handball coach Morten Soubak, Argentinian basketball coach Rubén Magnano, Russian rhythmic gymnastics coach Marina Nikolaeva, Japanese judo coach Yuko Fujii, Spanish badminton coach Francisco Felix Alvarez Dacal and Cuban Olympic wrestling coach Dagoberto Arbolaez Pérez (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil) Agent, 2016). These coaches promoted the technical training of Brazilian personnel. Considering what Appadurai (1996) has said, the “ethnoscape” is also marked by the international movement of guest workers around the globe.

Furthermore, the COB created the “Observer Program”, through which at least 49 countries (from all continents) visit the BSG to get to know the model (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil), 2013; Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil) Agent, 2016), and promoted Brazilian participation in international delegations: in Great Britain in 2012; in Argentina in 2016 (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil) Agent, 2016); and in Japan in 2017. Brazilian students also participated in international sporting contexts, such as the 6th Australian Youth Olympic Festival, in 2013 (in Sydney), and scholarships: “we took a girl from Joinville to train in the United States, an only child, had played the games [BSG] with us, she was training at a university in Miami, with scholarship perspective and everything” (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil) Agent, 2016). These processes relate to those observed by Maguire and Stead (1998) about migration of football and cricket athletes from countries with weaker economic situations, and Magnússon (2001) who pointed to the migration of chess, soccer and handball athletes to and from Iceland. The COB Agent pointed out that the American model is an example based on sports at school and university and expressed the desire to adopt this standard also in Brazil (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil) Agent, 2016).

According to COB magazine article (see Figure 3), participation in the BSG became an “access ramp” for international sports participation. Appadurai, in dealing with the ethnoscape flow, highlights how the stability that may exist in certain places is influenced by these transits: “the warp of these stabilities is everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion, as more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move or the fantasies of wanting to move” (Appadurai, 1996: 33–34).

Figure 3.

The article Das escolas para a Austrália (From Schools to Australia) illustrates a student who participated in the Brazilian School Games and, later, in the 6th Australian Youth Olympic Festival.

The traffic of teachers/coaches and students favors the propagation of certain ideologies about sports, destroying, building and/or reconstructing possibilities to think/do school sports. According to Bale and Maguire, in the 1980s “the global migration of professional, elite and college sports personnel (players, coaches, teachers and administrators) was a pronounced feature of sports development [. . .] and appears likely to continue to be so in the present decade” (Bale and Maguire, 1994: 6). Although they do not cite the works of Appadurai, the research of Maguire and Stead (1998) and Magnússon (2001) can illustrate this flow in the context of professional sport, through the market for buying and selling players.

The ethnic flow was also perceived in more subtle revisions such as the nomenclature of these events (that is closely related to the ideological flow). The word “Brazilian” used in previous editions (Brazilian Student Games, Brazilian School Games, and Brazilian School Championships), was replaced in two moments, first by “Olympics” and then by “Youth”:

From 2005 to 2013, the largest student sports event on the planet promoted social inclusion, revealed talent and grew in quantity and quality. The name even changed: the name School Olympics was replaced to make way for the Youth School Games, an allusion to the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) newest project, which debuted in 2010: Youth Olympic Games. (COB, 2013: 6, emphasis in the original)

Because of the Olympic Games in 2012, International Olympic Committee asked us to change our name to the Olympics, and then we incorporated “Youth School Games” because the International Olympic Committee created an international event that is Youth Olympic Games, the first edition was in 2010 in Singapore and last year was in China. So, we have had this new designation of “Youth School Games” since 2013. (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil) Agent, 2016)

If before, national entities had promoted these events, conferring a certain national identity to the competitions and with little (or no) international relevance, from 2005 there was a projection of school sports beyond the country’s borders, considering the role of the COB in the field of sports (clearly a “franchise corporation”). This is clear evidence of globalization within the school sports system, where local tradition has been replaced by the IOC’s global brand and culture. This movement is an example of what Betti (1998) pointed out about the growing influence of international sports institutions in the organization of sport and of what Macintosh et al. (1993) pointed out about the “transnational interactions”, in which the ideology of Olympism is conveyed, mainly, by the Olympic Games.

When using the concept “world civil society” from Octavio Ianni, Betti (1998) highlighted that globalization is manifested in sport through the growing importance of international bodies such as Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and the IOC, the former has increasingly interfered in the regulation and standardization of football on a world scale, and the latter has acquired increasingly solid influence as the Olympic events have achieved greater political and economic contours.

Contributing to the debate, Maguire states that, in a first impression, the global model of sport seems to diminish international contrasts, through events that promote the approximation of the world, however, the association “between sport and national cultures also means that international sport (which even in global events is fundamentally national in nature) undermines, and will continue in the foreseeable future to undermine, more regional political integration” (Maguire, 2005: 1). This relationship, in the case of the BSG, highlights what Appadurai (1996) presents as a critical point about the relationship between technoscape, ethnoscape and financescape; that is, although profoundly unpredictable, they serve as a parameter for the movement of the other. More aspects of this (in)dependent relationship are presented in the next subsection.

BSG and sporting technoscapes

Technology can be mechanical or informational (Appadurai, 1996). In terms of the BSG’s technological flow, we noticed two main contexts, one mechanical or directly related to sport and the other informational or indirect. Regarding the mechanical aspects, this flow comes from the preparation of the host cities, such as through the construction and/or maintenance of sports facilities. This process, according to the Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil), is similar to the IOC’s choice of host cities for the Olympic Games:

It is necessary that the city - besides the support of the city and/or the state government - has a good infrastructure to host the competition, such as gyms, swimming pool and athletics track [. . .]. In some cases, COB representatives indicate what improvements need to be made so that the city can reach the required level of organization. The renovation of a gymnasium or swimming pool, for example, can result in a major sports legacy for the host city. (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil), 2013: 8).

Besides sports facilities, sports equipment also follows a global pattern and strict technological standard. For example, in badminton, the permitted shuttles are only those approved by the Badminton World Federation, and in rhythmic gymnastics only official devices are allowed (according to the BSG’s official regulations). In terms of technoscapes there is a clear evidence of global configuration of technology that, probably, moves financescapes (Appadurai, 1996). According to Bale and Maguire, the flow of sports goods from one country to another or from one continent to another, such as sports complexes and artificial sports equipment, has become a millionaire business and represents “a transnational development in sports at the level of technoscapes” (Bale and Maguire, 1994: 6).

According to the Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil) Agent (2016), the BSG offers state-of-the-art sports technologies, which are probably not part of the reality of the majority of students participating. Thus, we can understand what Appadurai explains about individual experience in the globalization process, where an “individual actor is the last locus of this perspectival set of landscapes” (Appadurai, 1996: 33). As an individual actor s/he experiments and participates in the landscapes in larger formations.

Indirectly, the BSG also provides a high-tech structure of accommodation and food: accommodation in hotels (at least 3 stars); balanced food controlled by a nutritionist; and Social Center (which includes library, exhibitions, lounges, computers, sports clinics, space to portray a little of the culture of the five Brazilian regions, besides the stage for awards and recreational and entertainment activities) (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil), 2013). The insertion of these elements in the organization of the BSG is part of the experience of the COB in the organization of large events and offers a “new model” for school sports, which, just like the direct context, shows what are the principles that support the development of the BSG; that is, those focused on high performance. In agreement with de La Barre (2013), the Olympic “event” became totally “predictable”, and the model of city and structure requested is that accordingly of “success” – there is no alternative.

Another form of sports technology is information technology, through which information about a particular group or sport is conveyed. About the BSG, the information has been captured and controlled by mechanisms that gather data about the participants, from the registration for the event, through the Brazilian Register of Individuals, to the food data of athletes, which are controlled by electronic equipment (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil) Agent, 2016).

Sharing information among different school sports actors (national and international, who dialogue with the BSG) can be a decisive element to keep or to transform the BSG, playing a crucial role in public policy-making. This sharing, in turn, involves the knowledge about money flows and/or the emerging political possibilities, which may affect, for example, the transit of qualified labor (or not) to meet the demands of sport in a given location or the purchase of official sports products, having in turn also relations with the financial and ethnic flow. We also highlight the media as part of the technological flow, because it is an informational technology, that carries/transmits sporting images and drives feelings, and because of that became (with migration) a central element to identify the emergence of the globalized society.

BSG and sporting mediascapes

The most important partnership in media flow was between the COB and GO, the largest Brazilian and Latin American media and communication conglomerate. This partnership was signed in 2000, for a sport event “Olimpíada Colegial Esperança” (“Esperança” or “hope” refers to a GO’s program – “Criança Esperança”) – aimed at raising money for the development of social programs, and the name “Esperança” was shared to refer to the partnership of COB/GO.

In 2005, according to the BSG’s official regulations, GO became the official media of the BSG and was responsible for: transmission of competitions and events directly related to them (such as opening, closing and medal ceremonies); transmission of sounds and/or images of the phases of the BSG, in parts, live or not, through radio, or any type of television (open, closed and pay-per-view); printed media; fixation and marketing to the crowd in any type of material, including digital video disc; and the Internet or any public or private computer network, fixed or mobile telephony:

We ratify the indispensable partnership of the Ministry of Sports and Globo Organizations in the execution and promotion of this project. For the first time we had coverage and transmission on TV [sic], something unprecedented and unprecedented in the history of the competition. In 2005, the finals of men’s futsal and volleyball (15 to 17 years old) were broadcast, which provided national projection to the event and the opportunity for millions of spectators throughout Brazil. (Regulamento Geral, 2006: 2).

In 2005, male futsal and volleyball were broadcast. The choice of these reinforces the trend of the sports media in general, that is, the transmission of culturally traditional modalities in Brazil and mostly practiced by men. As shown in the work of Souza and Knijnik (2007), sportswomen in Brazil are underrepresented by the media. During the period observed, 87% of the reports were about sports practiced by men. On the images produced by the media, Appadurai (1996) clarifies that they involve complex variations, which depend, among other things, on the interests of those who own and control them.

The partnership COB/GO/Ministry of Sport brings together three major institutions dominant in the sports field and in the media field. This historicity, for once, has implications in the struggles fought by agents and institutions in these social spaces, thinking with the reflexive theory of Pierre Bourdieu, and helping to build the history of the fields, and consequently their particular logic (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2005). As noted by the Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil) Agent:

When Brazil begins its candidacy and wins the 2007 Pan American Games, the Globo Organizations, together with the Olympic Committee and the Ministry of Sport, began to imagine or create a project that could give more visibility and permanent visibility to national sport than just the Pan American Games taking place and what was going to be discussed about sport the next day. So, he begins to imagine that it would be important to work within the concept of Student Games [. . .]. Sport would be, let’s say, privileged in this process by the entry of the Ministry and also by the entry of Globo. So, they together, the three entities, at that moment, understood that the best model would be to develop the games again, let’s say, with more media strength, with more integration strength between the states. (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil) Agent, 2016)

By transforming the BSG into an event of broad public display, the media mobilize various interests in the sports field, and television coverage, by its mass adherence, turns these events into a commodity for consumption. Sporting events become deterritorialized and consumed on a global scale. According to Betti “spectacular sport on TV is an example, a product and a process of globalization. Television transforms sport in a global product and unifies symbolically North and South, West and East at the same time it preserves his national symbolism; “[. . .] sport can only become global because of television” (Betti, 1998: 129), assuming a characteristic clothing related to mercantilization, aimed at a totalitarian consumption, spectacularization and mediatization. According to Maguire “the consumption of sport is a hallmark of late capitalism” (Maguire, 2015: 521).

Media also helps to promote products associated with sports and sponsoring brands, “so, Globo also had products, that is, it also had to give visibility to its partners [. . .]” (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil) Agent, 2016). “Commercial affiliates reach two different types of audience: those at the mega event (locals and tourists), and the much larger number of people consuming the event via television broadcasts, the internet, or reading about it in the press” (Eisenhauer et al., 2014: 380). Thus, the association with GO also had as its objective the activation of sponsoring brands of other events under the responsibility of the COB, such as the 2007 Pan American Games, held in Rio de Janeiro, thereby ensuring safe spaces to globally communicate partners, brands and symbols.

Although presented separately, flows proposed by Appadurai (1996) are interspersed and amalgamated at various points. The ideological flow, for example, is present throughout the structure of the BSG, appearing especially in the media action that disseminates and transmits an ideal model of school competitions, especially, loaded with Olympic symbolism. Financescape (both private and public) is also moved by ideas, images and discourses (ideoscape) from the IOC/COB and the transit of coaches and students, and of technologies (mechanical and informational) which do not occur without the financial investment. Financial investment also requires returns in terms of development of school sports and promotion and dissemination of ideologies.

The work of imagination proposed by Appadurai (1996) is created by agents that develop and experience the flows of the BSG. As said by the manager of educational and cultural activities of the COB: “The intention is to make the young athlete feel a little bit of the climate surrounding the Olympic Games and learn, from an early age, the values that permeate the Olympic Movement” (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil), 2013: 11). Of the ambassadors it is stated that: “It’s the place where integration among young athletes from various states happens in the best way. To be close to them, to break this distance between the Olympic athletes and those who are starting, is very cool” (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil), 2013: 11), and “the competition of 12 to 14 years is the first step and the competition of 15 to 17 years, the second step for these young people to become, one day, professional athletes. And the coexistence with the more experienced ones helps them in this journey” (Brazilian Olympic Committee (Comitê Olímpico do Brasil), 2013: 13). These sentences show how the flows interconnected can create a “community of feelings” (Appadurai, 1996), that imagines and has feelings together.

Conclusion

Considering the main theoretical framework adopted (Appadurai, 1996), we affirm that the BSG, in the investigated period, presented a globalized structure for the development of school sports, perceived by all Appadurai’s flows: ethnic; media; technological; financial; and ideological. Given the history and position of the COB in the national and international sports field, it had a key role in consolidating this globalized perspective.

Against the background of the theoretical framework proposed by Appadurai (1996), the relationship between these flows depends on the context in which the BSG occurs. Thus, two actions of the Brazilian State were relevant to our analysis: (a) the approval of the Agnelo-Piva Law – which, among other things, gave to the COB the total freedom to develop the BSG; and (b) the applications to host the major sports events in 2007, 2014 and 2016 – which could project South America and promote Brazil abroad (Maharaj, 2015). This was a fertile ground for the BSG to be carried out under the management of the COB.

So, if we understand that, the “landscapes” are not fixed views, but they are perspectival constructs based on the historical, linguistic and political situations of person and groups involved (Appadurai, 1996), then the IOC, COB and the Brazilian State are part of this network of agents that, by experiencing a globalized sports world (Appadurai affirms the experimentation of the global world is synesthetic and pre-theoretical) create an “imagined world” for the BSG. This new imagined world, which from now also includes teachers, students, volunteers, and ambassadors is experienced by a “community of feelings”, that create kinds of charisma and worship around the BSG, as happens around sport and internationalism, that is observed looking at the transnational effects of the Olympics (Appadurai, 1996).

In a macro analysis of the BSG, two flows are key to this new world: the economic flow (marked by transfer of national capital to transnational institutions – Agnelo/Piva Law); and the ideological flow (around the sports internationalism, especially of the International Olympic Movement). If we consider that the International Olympic Movement represents the new organizational forms of the global world, operating in diverse parts of the world, eliminating borders and putting the future of nation states at risk (Appadurai, 1996), then, in this case, it has significant strength to trigger the financial flow, which in turn moves ethnic, media and technological flows.

In this way, the COB (and also the IOC) seems to have won more in this context, by transforming the BSG into a platform for Olympic Movement promotion among the national/local schools and international sports community. However, all those involved in some way, and according to the position they occupy in the specific social locus, in addition to the strength/capitals they possess, achieve their advantages and, in a Bourdieusian dimension, profits. It remains for us to analyze to what extent the benefit of one can be transformed into the weakening of the other (Dunning, 2010), especially when it comes to the relationship of school sports in the context of high performance.

Thus, if what we have observed is typical, there is a movement that values international sports production and causes the weakening (and perhaps the disappearance) of local/national sports production. Faced with the Olympic Movement, and once the Brazilian State embraced the international sports movement, it may be putting in danger the rights to sports and leisure in Brazil to be constitutionally guaranteed.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: The authors received financial support for the research from Instituto de Pesquisa Inteligência Esportiva/Universidade Federal do Paraná.

ORCID iD

Taiza Daniela Seron Kiouranis

Notes

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