Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 5 (4):396 - 413 (2011)
|Abstract||Sport, in modern times, finds its roots in the
mythological sources of ancient Greece, where it was born as a
sacred game to be performed in the honour of Zeus in Olympia or
of other gods elsewhere during the Panhellenic games. Since the
beginning of the twentieth century and until the 1970s sport was
mythogenic (Barthes 1975). But is sport still mythogenic in the
twenty-first century? Our analysis attempts to answer two
questions: (i) what has been the influence of doping and
sponsorship on contemporary sport; and (ii) how (if at all) have
both influenced the symbolic contemporary forms of the
sportsman/woman myth. We argue that modern sport has become
increasingly dependent upon the industrial and entertainment
worlds, thus losing along the way the imprinting of symbolic
innocence that the myth conferred in the recent past. Moreover,
the contemporary perception of sportsmen/women by the general
public has changed in so far as it concerns the sym