It might seem a little ironic that BP, or British Petroleum, has committed millions to sponsoring the US Olympic team, but its actually not that surprising in a world where most corporations have operations that span the globe. It’s also clearly part of long-term PR moves by the oil giant, started during the 2012 Olympics, to distance themselves from Deepwater Horizon spill. The commercials featuring Team BP, moreover, are a good entry point into seeing just how many corporate pies the multi-national oil company has its fingers in.

If you watch the “BP’s Team USA” commercial, it seems rather innocuous as Olympic commercials go: Athletes prepping for success that is somehow powered by fossil fuels (“American energy, wherever it comes from”). As members of Team BP are Top athletes in their fields, it is not surprising that they appear in several other commercials as well. Interestingly, however, though these other spots never once mention BP, many are from companies in which BP owns stock. Alpine Skier Heath Calhoun is in a touching AT&T ad; BP owns 715,000 shares of AT&T.[1] The shots of hockey player Julie Chu and cross-country skier Kikkan Randall in the Team BP ad actually appear to be lifted from their individual commercials for Bounty paper towels and Kashi cereal respectively. BP owns 425,000 shares of Procter and Gamble, the parent company of the Bounty brand. In fact, Procter and Gamble owns many of the brands featuring Olympic athletes in their commercials including CoverGirl who sponsors BP Team member Ashley Wagner and non-BP team members Gracie Gold (who is also sponsored by Visa in which BP has holdings), and NyQuil who sponsors Ted Ligety. Interestingly BP does not have holdings in Kellogg’s, the parent company of Kashi and competitor to Kraft (of which BP owns 204,000 shares) and General Mills (of which BP owns 46,000 shares). Kellogg however has long been an Olympic sponsor. Moreover, since members of Team Kellogg overlap with Team BP (Heath Calhoun and Kikkan Randall) and many of the companies for which Team Kellogg athletes appear in commercials are among those BP has holdings in, the cross-promotion is less surprising than a first glance would suggest.

Looking more broadly, BP owns shares of half (five out of ten) of the Worldwide Olympic Sponsors:

Coca-Cola: 317,000 shares

GE: 1,570,000 shares

McDonalds: 161,000 shares

P&G: 425,000 shares

Visa: 71,000 shares

They also hold 67,000 shares in Nike and 25,000 in Ralph Lauren, official outfitters of the US Olympic team and 470,000 shares in Comcast (parent company of NBC the official Olympic broadcasting partners).

There are many different reasons people are concerned over the commercialization of the Olympic games.  There is, for example, the argument that is ruins the spirit of the games, something people as different as author Mary Perryman and the Pope assert. In response to those allegations, long-time IOC member Richard Pound argues that sponsors are the reason there is such a thing as the Olympic games in the first place. It’s always worth considering the hypocrisy of rules that don’t allow athletes to talk about or display those corporate sponsorships at the games, however (although social media is allowing some a way around that). The biggest story in tracing the corporate investment trail hinted at by BP’s commercial, however, is that it’s not enough to talk about individual companies trading in on the media spectacle that is the Olympics. In contemporary capitalism many of the corporate sponsors are making money off of other companies making money off of the Olympics. That’s pretty meta. Transnational capital is the big winner of the Olympics regardless of which athletes end up on the medal podium.

For years, America has lacked a true constitutive “other”—the sort of competing entity that can represent everything we are not and thus help us agree on what we are. Yes, the Muslim world has played the role of Enemy of the State for the past decade, but the varied, decentralized and complex nature of that entity has prevented anything approaching a consensus among the American populace. What we have missed is the simple (and, of course, oversimplified) Soviet—a militarized, soulless Ivan Drago to our informal, scrappy Rocky Balboa.  And while that pre-millenial foil is gone forever, the Sochi Olympics has brought us something perhaps even better.  The unending string of hilarious #SochiProblems and daily stories of government gluttony filling our Facebook feeds have positioned Russia not so much as America’s polar opposite, but instead as a sort of shadow version of the American Way of Life.

In putting on the Sochi winter games, Russia has expended an absurd amount of resources—about $50 billion worth—with the expectation of fundamentally repositioning the country’s place in the global imagination.  And although much of the media coverage surrounding Sochi has focused on the tremendous amount of graft and waste it took to ring up such a bill, the Russian government is unlikely to view the event as anything but a success.  Above all, President Vladimir Putin wanted to use the Sochi spotlight to disrupt the unipolar, American-centric geopolitical map that has emerged since the fall of the Soviet Union.  And in some small way he has.  It takes a terribly powerful man to waste such a terrible sum of money.  The cost may have been surrealistically high, but for Putin it was a one-time-only opportunity to demonstrate that he has the surplus of power and the utter lack of conscience one needs to make a play for international hegemony.

The United States, however, has gotten a much better deal, at least in terms of buying an improved sense of national identity. Russia, in no small part due to Sochi, no longer embodies a set of virtues—extreme discipline, ideological orthodoxy, etc—that we choose to reject.  Instead it has come to stand in for all of those vices that we fear we may have but would rather not face.  No longer Drago, Russia has become America’s drunken Uncle Paulie, a bumbling, wasteful reminder of what we could become but never will.  Whenever Rocky is down, he can always look to Paulie’s blubbery ineptitude and realize he’s not in such bad shape.  And now, whenever Americans fear their government may be dolling out favors to corporations or spending money on all the wrong things, well, at least we don’t build Dadaist toilets when the whole world is watching.

This narrative received a wholly unexpected boost last Sunday with Michael Sam, a mid-level professional football prospect, announced that he is gay.  The reaction from the National Football League has been predictably tepid, with nearly every team echoing the standard neo-liberal take on gay rights.  Discrimination cannot be tolerated if it is going to get in the way of profits or, in the case of an NFL team, winning football games.  Of course, America in general and its sports culture in specific still have a long way it to go when it comes to eliminating discrimination over sexuality.  The discussion should be less the sports media’s preferred “where will Sam be drafted?” and more “why does only one player feel safe enough to be open about being gay?”  However, in comparison to our Other Russia, America looks positively enlightened.  When faced with the medieval anti-gay laws and mockable public statements (“We don’t have [gays] in our town”) on display in Sochi, it’s easy to give America a pass.  Russia’s backwardness on the issue provides the perfect backdrop against which to avoid asking truly tough questions about ourselves.

The Washington Post’s Max Fisher has called for Americans to avoid the temptation of Russophobia when engaging in discourse about Russia.  It can be all too easy to mock a population that has long been the target of so many stereotypes and Internet memes. In general this is good advice.  However, it by no means suggests that we should hesitate to condemn the authoritarianism and corruption that Putin’s Russia has put on display in its effort to make the world it seriously. Just as important, however, is that we use the opportunity as a means of interrogating the weaknesses of our society, not as an excuse to ignore them.

As we approach the London 2012 Games, it is worth reflecting on the promotional paratexts that surround the Games, as these are often, too easily, mocked or dismissed in ways that do not sufficiently account for the complexities of promotional design work, or the way that texts such as logos and mascot films amplify clusters of meaning and expectation around media events. The London mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville, have been a particular subject of press criticism since their unveiling in 2010 – two sleek CGI characters distinguished by a huge cyclopean camera-eye.  Generating revenue through toy licensing deals, the mascots have also been designed to embody the digital address of the Olympics, inviting children to interact with their “Olympic journey” through virtual encounters on Twitter, Facebook, and an interactive website. While their alien look has led to some very un-childlike descriptions within international media coverage – Vanity Fair calling Wenlock a “ghoulish cycloptic phallus,” the Toronto Sun describing the mascots as “walking penis monsters,” and Twitter postings labelling them “terror sperm” – Wenlock and Mandeville are a deliberate departure from the history of cuddly Olympic mascots first embodied by the cartoon bear Misha at the 1980 Moscow Olympics and carried through to Beijing’s Fuwa mascots. Phallic fears notwithstanding, they assume the appearance of high-tech toys born from – and for – a digital world.

Like the graffiti design of the London 2012 logo, which also received a press drubbing when unveiled in 2007, Wenlock and Mandeville have been given a deliberate multimedia inscription. This is captured in a series of animated mascot films released periodically in the UK leading up to the Games. Viewable online, on British children’s channels such as CBBC, as well as in film theatres, the film shorts began with Out of a Rainbowin May 2010 and have been followed by Adventures on a Rainbow (March 2011), Rainbow Rescue (December 2011), and Rainbow to the Games (May 2012). Animated by the Chinese digital media firm Crystal CG, these films reveal interesting networks of production. In industry terms, the mascot films are the result of multi-level collaboration taking place between British and Chinese creative personnel. While the shorts were written, produced, directed, narrated, and scored by British artists, much of the animation production was completed in Crystal’s offices in London and Beijing, highlighting the rise of Chinese digital expertise in the media  industry sub-sector of promotional design. 

Textually, the animated shorts serve a particular brand function in the UK, selling the Games as a participatory national event and identifying a diverse and youth-friendly selection of British Olympians as its sporting face.  The shorts also, importantly, develop a narrative of media engagement, anticipating the Olympics through mobile screens and social networking sites aimed specifically at children. The liquid design of Wenlock and Mandeville and the use of mobile phones and SMS messaging within the narrative arc of the mascot films both reinforce the digital identity of the London Olympics. While UK factories are figured in the mascot films as central to building the physical infrastructure of the Games, the meaning of the Olympics is vested in the mobile, data-driven world of the mascots. While the new media aesthetic of the logo and mascots has come under fire – one media critic labelling Wenlock and Mandeville “appalling computerised smurfs for the iPhone generation” – the entryway paratexts of London 2012 are more interesting than these sniffy descriptions suggest. Not least, they reveal the changing way that media brands, including the Olympics, are seeking to reconstruct themselves for the converged digital media environment. To what extent the London Games lives up to aspirations of being the first digital Olympics, and whether the mascot films become mere fig-leaves for impending organizational pratfalls, remains to be seen.  

Was it the spectacle of watching South Korea and Japan find a new battleground in women’s ice skating? Was it the death of Ukrainian luger, Nodar Kumaritashvili, and NBC’s ghoulish love in the hours afterward for replaying it ad infinitum? The US men’s hockey team’s supposedly “improbable” run to the gold medal game? Contested disqualifications and ensuing death threats in short track ice skating? The debate over who should’ve lit the Olympic flame? The British press’s determination to label the games a mismanaged failure? Joannie Rochette’s skate in the face of adversity? The Canadian women’s ice hockey team smoking cigars on the ice after winning? The Plushenko-Lysacek “to quad or not to quad” debate? “Harry Potter’s” ski jump redemption? Or even the bi-annual, “what? That counts as a sport?!” discussion?

And for our non-American readers, what are the frames that the rah, rah, USA, USA drumbeat of NBC missed? What were the equally egregious rah, rah moments from various other broadcasters that had you cringing?

Many of the complaints about the sport can be summed up by two key points: (1) It’s said to be boring; and (2) Most of its competitors don’t “look” like athletes, nor do its fans seem like regular fans. Let’s examine each.

To say the sport is boring is odd, since almost every sport is boring. Or, rather, almost every other sport is no less boring. Baseball is two hours of men scratching themselves and winking at each other, and about ten minutes of action. It’s no wonder that the Super Bowl is famous for its ads, since football has more stoppages in play than actual play. Soccer (a.k.a. the real football, you know, the one in which the foot and the ball actually combine on a regular basis) is basically a bunch of ball passing. Basketball, NASCAR, and hockey are faster and a lot more happens, but the repetitiveness of each creates its own inertia, punctuated by just a few slam dunks, a crash, or two-on-one breakaways respectively. Sports are usually exciting to play, but rarely exciting to watch. They allow great social interaction, are alibis for community and bonding, and the boringness can be enjoyable, so let me be clear that this is not an attack on sport. Granted, less people have curled than played with a football or basketball, so it’s also perhaps harder to feel sense memories with curling that add excitement. But objectively speaking, the sport is no more or less exciting than almost any sport.

What I enjoy about curling is that I can watch it and relax, reflect, and contemplate. But if we’re honest, isn’t that what most sports do?

Some might counter the above question by noting that fans are raucous and rowdy for other sports in a way that they aren’t for curling. Which leads us to the second objection: curling’s players and viewers are deemed inappropriate. They’re rarely urban, often hailing from small towns instead. They can tend to be older – when Kevin Martin is the sport’s Kobe Bryant or Wayne Gretzky, many find it laughable. And they’re balanced in gender, which in turn means that audience behavior is usually much less masculine. When Martin was pretty much guaranteed the gold medal at the end of his game with Norway, the crowd started singing the national anthem, not “hey hey hey, goodbye,” and the Norwegian skip smiled warmly. There was no trash talk in the house (if you pardon the curling pun). But why can’t sports be this way? Are we so keen to keep it a young male arena for chest-beating and for metaphorical war? And must it seem to be all the rage in New York or Milan to count as worthy?

Kevin Martin, 46 year old gold medal curler

Perhaps there’s hope in the news that Wall Street fell in love with the sport this time around, helped on by its appearance on CNBC after trading hours. The alpha male predatory environment that led to our crappy economy could use a sport with a star who is a bald, wrinkled guy from the prairies, and who runs Kevin’s Rocks-n-Racquets when he’s not playing. It’s not a sport drowning in testosterone, but that’s its charm.

Formed in the wake of the 1970 Ohio National Guard shooting and killing of four students who were protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State, Akron, Ohio’s Devo has long held the perspective that humankind has regressed. Their most damning evidence has been that the corporate groupthink that has dominated US style management and has been the target of most of Devo’s artistic barbs has metastasized over the last thirty plus years to too much of the globe with disastrous effects (see global recession, a particular two-term US President with a MBA who managed the country into the ground, Windows Vista, etc.). Devo’s latest solution to the problem of corporate idiocracy: join em. Later this year Devo and Warner Brothers will release their first LP in 20 years, their first no major label since 1984. Twenty six years later, Devo’s energy domes have been recharged as they ride the crest of a fairly successful return to action. Last year’s national tour took Devo across the US as they played back-to-back nights where, in select cities, they performed the entirety of their two most popular albums, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo and Freedom of Choice one night at a time to sold out clubs and theaters. The Devo renaissance is in full force.

For me this comes not a minute too soon. A year removed from the eight-year horror story which was the beginning of this decade, the party responsible for this frightfest has never (and probably will never) admitted any guilt for driving the US into the worst set of crises in my lifetime. Worse yet, the new party in power has wasted a year trying to forge a politically-impossible middle with a group of ideologues who don’t believe in science and have contempt for any kind of rational governance. Given this equation, I don’t know which party is dumber. However, I do know that in 2010 it feels like de-evolution is now a fact of life. As Devo puts it, it is “a prophecy fulfilled”. And Devo’s new image fits the times perfectly: a corporate, focus-grouped driven set of artists that will happily produce collective art ala capitalism. In a recent interview with Billboard, Devo’s leader, Mark Mothersbaugh, the magazine noted that “the band is taking a consciously ironic ultra-corporate approach to the release, including focus-grouping every aspect of the album’s marketing.” The stupidity of “focus testing the future” is promoted in their most recent YouTube missive and Devo’s latest flash-based send up of online testing, The Devo Color Study. That latter example asks questions such as “Which color for the car makes you dislike the man more?” and “What color ink is this man writing his ransom note in?” in a voice that can only be described in an absurd computer/euro accent. You can’t help but finish the survey, receive your “Devo Color” (mine was red) and you are asked to share it on your social network of choice. It’s both a joke, an art project and and a business strategy. It’s something Warhol would applaud. It may even show up in Devocom’s bottom line. Whatever it is, Devo appears to be moving themselves and their audience someplace new. As band member and co-leader Gerard Casale puts it, “We feel like all our dire predictions have come true.” Casale continues, “Now, that it’s real, it’s time to move on.” In other words, Devo has re-engaged our culture once again right at the time when we need them most. Duty now for the future, indeed.

There is thus a fair amount of professional insanity in suggesting that I think I know better. In fact, I even know the exact date of beginning of the postmodern era: 28th July 1984, the day of the opening ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. At the tender age of twelve I had persuaded my parents to allow me and my cousin to stay up and watch the opening ceremony. Having drifted in and out of sleep following the broadcast from L.A. on Western European Time, I could no longer be certain which realm of imagination – television or dreaming ‑ the rocket man flying into the Coliseum belonged to when I woke up on the living room sofa the next morning. The Los Angeles games offered a dramatic prefigurement of what was to come: the disappearance of the Communist block (the Soviet Union and most of its allies boycotted the 1984 games in retaliation for the US led boycott of the Moscow games four years earlier), the emerging symbiosis between celebrity culture and professional sports and the dramatic rise of spectacle and consumer culture ‑ the future had arrived and each subsequent Olympic summer games further underscored the global, postmoderm trajectory of the Olympic movement post Los Angeles.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Olympic winter games are a rudiment of a bygone modern era of (television) culture. Whereas summer games have adopted to changing viewing habits by adding sports that feature global sport stars through the (re)inclusion of tennis (1988) or golf (2016) and the opening up of the competitions to professional athletes such as the 1992 US basketball “Dream Team”, Winter Olympics have essentially remained fifteen ways of sliding.

In televisual terms, the types of sports featured in the Winter Olympics are those associated with the modern era of broadcasting: Alpine skiing, speed skating, biathlon, luge, or bobsled are rarely supported by large enough fan cultures to stand on their own televisual feet. Instead they have survived throughout television history as part of the magazine format in the mould of BBC’s Grandstand, the weekend afternoon sports magazine programme that ran form the early days of television in 1958 until its demise in 2007 when in a deregulated media market the “sports-interested viewer” had given way to the fan and enthusiast of individual sports such as football, baseball, basketball, tennis or Formula One motor racing. During the Winter Olympics this magazine type coverage of different competitions under the banner of winter sports is briefly revived – yet only by resorting to the life-support machine of the X-factorisation of winter sports coverage as national broadcasters have shifted away from the universal coverage of different sports events to the human interest stories surrounding particular competitors from that country.

The nation, in fact, is the true marker of Winter Olympics’ inherently modern nature. Summer games have increasingly become a platform for global sporting celebrities from Carl Lewis to Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps, transcending the national as (sole) frame of reference. Olympic winter games, in contrast, remain a strangely local phenomenon in a globalising world. In its 86 year history Olympic Winter games have been staged in only ten countries, all in the northern hemisphere.  The fame of Winter Olympians has accordingly remained infinitely more localised and ephemeral. Competitors are often barely known even by their national audiences. Former stars such as surprise 1984 Olympic downhill champion Billy Johnson or four times ski jumping gold medallist Matti Nykänen have not only been quickly forgotten by the wider public, but have struggled financially and personally as their fame dissipated. The precariousness of Winter Olympians’ fame so closely tied to national success and thus so interchangeable from games to games is possibly best illustrated by the fact that even the memories of those whose achievements remain outstanding among Olympians such as US American speed skater Eric Heiden pale in comparison to who remains one of the best-known stars of the Winter Olympics of all times: British ski jumper Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards – an athlete who became known for his dramatic lack of competitiveness that made every jump he managed without crashing a seemingly greater achievement than the competition’s longest and most daring jumps.

Danger and risk have endured as further markers of Winter Olympics archaic traditions. Even before tonight’s Opening Ceremony, Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili fatally crashed during a training run on the ice track in Whistler. The menacing nature of high speed winter sports not only sets them apart from most sports at the Summer Olympics, but bears all the hallmarks of sport – to rather liberally borrow from Carl von Clausewitz’s words – “as the continuation of war with other means” – echoed in the words of Georgian Minister for Culture and Sport, Nikolos Rurua, who evoked the war between Russia and Georgia during the 2008 Beijing Olympics (or, in his words “invasion of Georgia by Russia”)  and called Kumaritashvili “a fallen comrade”.

It is not without logic that the Cold War provided winter games’ most natural habitat. In the bipolar world of the second half of the 20th century winter games served as snow-covered stage for the confrontation between ideological power blocs, one that culminated and crystallised in the finale of the 1980s Olympic ice hockey tournament in Lake Placid between the USA and the USSR – one of the last occasions when Americans could resort to a narrative of the agency of the underdog overcoming, against all odds, the seemingly insurmountable might of the system of their opponents – a story, one imagines, sworn enemies of the United States like to tell themselves these days. Much like the James Bond franchise, Winter Olympics have never been quite the same again since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

For the next sixteen days, the Olympic winter games offer a journey into our recent, modern past; to some an enjoyable walk (or, rather, slide) down memory lane, to others a reminder of traditions best kept in the past. Vancouver as a distinctly multicultural and global city, of course, holds as great a promise of transporting Winter Olympics into the world of the 21^st century as any host city. But I doubt they have a rocket man.