Symbolic Footprints: Media Representations of Host Countries

At the beginning of each new Olympiad - the four years pe riod between two Olympic Games - fresh discussions arise in academia, in general day-to-day discourse and in the media, about the intended legacies for the new Games. Moreover, this debate tends to use comparisons between editions of the Games as rhetorical tool in order to assess the plans and preparations of the legacies and the Games itself. In those debates, legacies - or footprints - are commonly linked to questions of jobs creation, urban regeneration, sport participation, and the environment. What is proposed here in this chapter is to discuss the apparent symbolic footprint left by third parties - the media - through how they discursively construct the host city and nation, and the links between that with the organisation of the Games.