Abstract
Which phenomena present the more insightful subject for investigation: the outlier or the everyday? It is a continual dilemma within academic research that often is informed by one’s epistemology, but also can be argued from a number of standpoints, including the level of desire for generalizability. During the pandemic, some argued that unique insights could be gleaned by this (hopefully) once-in-a-generation moment (see Dubinsky, 2023; Schallhorn et al., 2022), but one could just as ably argue the inverse, claiming the pandemic as an outlier and the insights null and void. Again, the debate resides within the typical versus atypical domain.
Enter megasporting events, which represent atypical focus on typical, familiar sports. A soccer game? Typical. A UEFA Champions League Final? Megasport. As advanced by Lawrence Wenner in his seminal edited book, Media, Sports, and Society (1989), megasports are massive sporting events for which fans set their calendar. If you are a tennis fan, you know the Wimbledon final matches occur in early July. A motorsports enthusiast may know that the 24 hr of Le Mans happens in June, one of the shortest nights of the year. FIFA Women’s World Cup fans may not know the exact dates, but can often note that 2031, for instance, is a “World Cup Year.” These markers are important as they connote the power of the moment: a megasporting event is worth dropping other aspects of your life, merely so you can bear witness.
Is the imprint of most megasporting events the same as in year’s past? Yes and no, depending on the metric. For instance, Olympic ratings are down from peak viewership in the 1980s and 1990s, yet dominate the competition in manners never before witnessed. In the United States, Olympic ratings at the turn of the century were the equivalent of the next three highest-rated networks combined; now, Olympic ratings are equivalent to the next 17 highest-rated networks combined. The most quoted line from the 1950 classic film Sunset Boulevard came from Norma Desmond, who quipped that “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” The same sentiment can be advanced when speaking of megasports.
Speaking beyond the realm of sports to events of substantial significance, Roche (2000) contends that megaevents are “large-scale cultural (including commercial and sporting events), which have dramatic character, mass popular appeal, and international significance” (p. 1). Muller (2015) advances four size-related status markers as necessary for designation as a megaevent: visitor attractiveness, mediated reach, cost, and transformative impact. Within this context, he upgrades an event, such as the Summer Olympic Games (now a “giga-event,” p. 636), while an event with more national than international appeal, such as the Super Bowl, receives a downgrade due to the lack of scope (now a “major event,” p. 636).
Regardless of those layered distinctions, megasports arguably hold a larger place in society as most other cultural touchstones splintered when internet made the overall number of choices a series of niches, rather than a more general offering. A popular cooking show becomes 800 different types of YouTube cooking shows with smaller audiences and more precise foci. A popular magazine becomes less popular yet more focused, with hundreds of websites serving those initial purposes and much, much more. Tolentino calls such decentralization the “end of shared civic reality” (p. 30), while Benoit and Billings (2020) dubbed it media balkanization, as “ ‘did you see that’ was largely replaced in the cultural lexicon with ‘don’t tell me, I may watch it later’ ” (p. 5).
Upon witnessing the global phenomena that was “Barbenheimer”, where moviegoers flocked to the theaters for the challenge of seeing the thematically opposed Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day, Dockterman (2023) concluded that “if there’s one lesson to be learned ... it’s that we as a society are desperate for communal experiences” (para. 25). Other than such film anomalies, the only things people seemingly refuse to time shift are sporting events and the occasional election or news tragedy. The liquidity of megasport becomes an even larger asset within such an environment, as viewers will even watch commercials in order to witness a contest in real time. Indeed, among all of these communicative fragments, megasports hold audiences remarkably well. After all, there may now be thousands of biking websites, yet there is still only one Tour de France. In the United States, 94 of the top 100 television ratings of 2022 were sports (Karp, 2023). Many were not megaevents, yet had characteristics exceeding other non-sporting events claiming the moniker.
Thus, we offer an issue of Communication & Sport that is solely focused on megasporting events. One can quibble over distinctions as the issue traverses the Olympics to the Commonwealth Games to hockey’s Stanley Cup playoffs, but the bottom line is that if you’re a fan of these sports, these are the events to watch. Yes, they matter because of audience size. Yes, they matter because of local hosting impacts. Yes, they matter for a multitude of other reasons. However, we contend that a core reason why they should matter for communication scholars resides in Procter’s (1990) construction of the “dynamic spectacle” (p. 117), where shared experience helps to foster community. Billings and Wenner (2017) postulate that the sturdiness of the modern megasporting event should be viewed as fairly predictable, writing that: It should not be surprising that the experiencing and interpretation of such moments, infused as they are with the potentialities of significance, can interact in compelling ways with one’s self-identity and values. Indeed, the uniqueness of this kind of experience may, in some part, explain why so many look forward to the ritualistic experiencing of megasporting events. And as these megasporting events and their audiences have grown, the idea that these larger and grander forms of sport have much broader cultural significance than everyday and more localized sporting competitions has become societally reified (p. 4).
In advancing this issue focusing on megasporting events, many authors contribute excellent works that keep these insights flowing.