Theatrical presentations within Olympic Ceremonies serve as global stages from where nations project collective, teleological narratives about their historical role on the international scene. To do so, the hosts present tailor-made accounts of their past, present, and imagined future within a global context. While ceremonies have been widely examined as sites of national representation, their temporal dimension - particularly how they anticipate and visualise the future - has received limited attention. This article analyses how the future has been represented in the artistic segments of Summer Olympic ceremonies from 1980 to 2004, unveiling how changing socio-cultural and geopolitical contexts - such as the Cold War, its end, and the emergence of a multipolar world - have shaped how organising committees have imagined and presented a nationalised view of the future to global audiences. Through the analysis of official recordings, reports and media guides, this study combines methods from cultural history and media analysis to examine how narrative strategies articulate broader shifts in nationalised collective imagination. It argues that, despite late Cold War tensions and growing awareness of global warming, the Olympic ceremonies of the analysed period have mostly conveyed optimistic and universalist visions of progress, which are consistent with the Games’ celebratory ethos and the modern nation’s strategic geopolitical aspirations at the time. By situating Olympic ceremonies within the broader history of futurism, the article highlights how these events merged national mythologies and ambitions with contemporary human anxieties and hopes.

From the inception of the Parade of Nations in London in 1908 to its latest instalment in Tokyo in 2020, billions have watched different generations of men and women entering the Olympic stadium carrying their nations' flags as national heroes. As a product of modern Western civilisation, the Olympic movement mirrors the advances of an increasingly global society towards socially progressive agendas or otherwise. The twentieth century's latter half was a period of profound and necessary changes in women's rights. Gender inclusion, however, does not mean gender equality. Such an ongoing gradual process can be catalysed by more women being represented in leading roles formerly exclusively reserved for men. A multi-method longitudinal study of twenty-six summer Olympic opening ceremonies was conducted to measure the historical development of the likelihood of women being selected to be (and be represented to international audiences as) the main protagonists in the Parades of Nations. The data shows that despite the growing number of female flag bearers, since Munich 1972, women have been more likely to appear as aesthetically appealing event hostesses than the leaders of their teams.

Durante a segunda metade do século XIX, as Exposições Universais eram os maiores megaeventos do mundo. Nações periféricas, impérios europeus e suas ex-colônias compartilhavam um espaço físico onde podiam exibir com orgulho seus avanços sociais e tecnológicos em direção a um modelo utópico de sociedade moderna. O recém-criado Império do Brasil (1822-1889) aproveitou essas oportunidades para forjar sua própria identidade. No entanto, os comitês organizadores brasileiros desses eventos pareciam incomodados com o fato do país pertencer ao grupo das últimas nações do Hemisfério Ocidental que ainda não haviam abolido a escravidão. Neste artigo, utilizamos o conceito de aniquilação simbólica(termo que vem das ciências da comunicação) para analisar os meios utilizados pelos comitês brasileiros para fugir o tema da escravidão.

Most of the research on the sociocultural content presented by Olympic hosts centers on single-point analyses of events. Whereas longitudinal analyses have been used to evaluate changes in audiences’ reception and the media portrayal of the content brought by the Olympic Games, few studies have focused on the comparative study of Olympic traditions, promotional materials, and artifacts. Notwithstanding its limited use to date, Longitudinal Olympic Research (LOR) is a valuable tool for comparing different societies and historical periods, being particularly relevant in the assessment of long-term social trends and understanding the role the present plays in the representation of the past. This research note discusses LOR's use to date and suggests possible new avenues for future research, as well as its risks and limitations.

The 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil conveyed - by its slogan, mascot, posters and ceremonies - the idea of a Mulatto Brazil (an inventive and festive nation under the sign of two idiosyncratic worlds). We argue that such a reference - based on the duality between Dionysius and Apollo (as contemplated by Nietzsche and brought to the context of Brazil and football by Freyre) - was used as a means of bringing forward an idea of the exceptionality of Brazilian society (based on nationalist concepts of ethnicity) to attract tourists, ease social tensions and justify the event's costs.

Abstract In March 2020 – following the rapid increase of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) cases in the country – several Brazilian sports leagues momentarily ceased to slow the virus spread among the population. Despite the record number of deaths caused by the disease, most of these leagues re-started by mid-July. Brazilian TV channels offered football match reruns as an alternative to fill weekly schedule gaps. Therefore, within a somewhat dystopian context of political chaos, deep economic recession and unparalleled public health crisis, the most-watched sports channel in the country, SporTV, decided to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Brazil’s third FIFA World Cup title at the 1970 men’s tournament by rerunning the six matches played by the successful national football team (aka Seleção), from April 14 to the 19 and on June 21. Focusing on Twitter, this article demonstrates how the moment provided content for social media narratives about the country’s assumed ‘glorious’ past, its fractured contemporary state and uncertain futures. In doing so, we offer insights into the complexities of memory craft within sport histories and nation-making practices.

Ao longo das últimas décadas, o Brasil havia construído a imagem de uma nação emergente e progressista que passava, pouco a pouco, a exercer papel de liderança dentro do cenário político internacional. Neste artigo, efetuamos uma análise de conteúdo das cerimônias dos Jogos Olímpicos do Rio – realizadas em 2012 e em 2016 – revelando suas referências fragmentárias e mitos políticos. Em seguida, as comparamos com o posicionamento do atual governo com relação ao ambientalismo, ao multiculturalismo e à tolerância social. Desta maneira, ficou evidente que as representações do Brasil e dos brasileiros, expostas internacionalmente durante o governo Rousseff através das cerimônias olímpicas, diferem profundamente da imagem que o governo Bolsonaro buscou dar ao país a partir dos últimos anos da década de 2010. Apesar dos esforços de consecutivas administrações – sobretudo após a redemocratização, na década de 1980 – para transmitir a imagem de um Brasil emergente e progressista, crises políticas, a recessão econômica e, sobretudo, a vitória de um regime reacionário e antiambientalista nas eleições de 2018 colocaram em xeque tal narrativa nacional romantizada, revelando – internacionalmente e domesticamente – um país de contrastes, em que campos opostos competem pela nação como espaço sociopolítico e objeto simbólico.

During the second half of the 19th century, the World’s Fairs were the largest mega-events in the world. Peripheral nations, European empires and their former colonies shared a physical space in which they could proudly exhibit their social and technological advances towards a utopian model of modern society. The recently created Empire of Brazil (1822-1889) took advantage of these opportunities to forge its own identity. Nevertheless, the Brazilian organizing committees of these events seemed uneasy with the fact that the country was one of the last nations in the Western Hemisphere which hadn’t abolished slavery. In this article, we have used the concept of symbolic annihilation (a term that comes from communication sciences) to analyze the means used by Brazilian committees to avoid the topic of slavery.

During the second half of the 19th century, the World's Fairs were the largest mega-events in the world. Peripheral nations, European empires and their former colonies shared a physical space in which they could proudly exhibit their social and technological advances towards a utopian model of modern society. The recently created Empire of Brazil (1822-1889) took advantage of these opportunities to forge its own identity. Nevertheless, the Brazilian organizing committees of these events seemed uneasy with the fact that the country was one of the last nations in the Western Hemisphere which hadn't abolished slavery. In this article, we have used the concept of symbolic annihilation (a term that comes from communication sciences) to analyze the means used by Brazilian committees to avoid the topic of slavery.

Olympic ceremonies are international arenas from where the hosting nations often display revisited versions of their nationalistic accounts to update their identities. The analysis of such events can thus unveil the progression or regression of a nation towards a given political agenda. By the same token, their study can also expose different ideological stands between successive ruling parties as well as different historical moments of the hosting nation. The theatrical depiction of the 2012 London/Rio handover ceremony can be thus understood as a historical milestone on the nation's soft-power development. What is more, the recent events that took place in the country shortly after the event and during the event's Olympiad (2016-2020) - i.e. civil unrests caused by corruption scandals and a deep economic crisis which culminated with political turmoil and the election of a far-right president in 2018 - have given to the ceremony a further connotation as the symbolic pinnacle of Brazil's New Republic economic growth and its advancements towards a more progressive political agenda.

Hosting the Olympics is a singular opportunity to build an updated narrative of the nation. Such a narrative is traditionally intended to emphasize the hosting country contributions toward the modern project through the displaying of key nationalistic accounts linking the country's history to the development of western society. In the case of the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, its organizing committee has sought into Brazil's history different elements that were central to both the formation of Brazilian identity and the discussion over current global issues. Therefore, the country's enduring relation with nature as well as national narratives such as modernist Anthropophagy, the discourse of ethnic miscegenation, and the myth of Brazil as a racial democracy became historical credentials to use environmentalism and tolerance as the paramount features of Rio-2016's aesthetics as well as a means to denounce xenophobia and the effects of the Anthropocene on the planet. We argue that the exposition of these two issues in the event's ceremonies was a way to symbolically insert the country within modernity's forefront. In this article, we examine the sociopolitical aspects that led to the creation and popularization of Brazilian nationalistic narratives that were later used during the Rio 2016 opening ceremony and the ways such aspects were internationally conveyed during the aforementioned theatrical presentation.

Megaeventos internacionais têm como objetivo transmitir uma narrativa favorável para nações anfitriãs e seu povos. No caso do Brasil, a organização da Copa do Mundo da Fifa 2014 e dos Jogos Olímpicos de Verão de 2016 proporcionou ao país uma poderosa exposição midiática capaz de apresentar novas narrativas de sua história em um período de apenas dois anos. Este artigo descreve como os comitês organizadores dos eventos mencionados representaram os primeiros habitantes do país, os ameríndios, com a seleção de diferentes narrativas construídas ao longo da história intelectual brasileira. Portanto este artigo busca, por meio de um apanhado histórico, expor os movimentos culturais e eventos políticos que culminaram no entendimento que parte da sociedade brasileira – na qual os comitês supracitados estão inseridos – tem sobre os ameríndios e seu papel na construção da nação.

Due to their periodicity and global reach, sports mega-events play a role in the symbolic construction of an imagined community progress towards a given politic agenda. In the case of Brazil, the FIFA World Cups organized in the country, in 1950 and 2014, may serve as key occasions to the understanding of the historical development of two principles which have been central to Brazilian politics since her independency: unity and modernity; or - as in the national flag motto - order and progress. Therefore, this article sets Brazil's (inter)national sociopolitical context in the 20th and 21st centuries first halves to, then, analyse the promotional material of the 1950 and 2014 FIFA World Cups (i.e. posters, ceremonies and so on). Such analysis is focused on the (re)creation of Brazilian identity through the games as well as the role of regional cultures in this process.

In the past two decades, globalization has become a popular term to explain the spirit of our time, society and future. Therefore many studies about globalization in different areas have been devel ...