INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC ACADEMY 7th JOINT - IOA

oadcaster commentators to educate audiences about Olympic
history, family, values, and so forth (Morgas Spà, Rivenburgh,
and Larson, 1995: 246).
In Canada, the intersection of athletic competition and the
mediation of television is seen most frequently in Saturday “Hockey
Night in Canada” (HNIC) telecasts by the national broadcaster, the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). The emergence in the
1950s of sport television, Kidd asserts, “changed our lives in many
ways-in Canada, Stanley Cup telecasts have become more sacred than
Sunday-and they have greatly increased the importance of sports”
(Kidd, 1989: 1-5). The auto manufacturers, petroleum companies, and
beer producers that have sponsored HNIC telecasts over the past halfcentury
do little to contest Gruneau’s (1989a) notion that sports
telecasts are intimately tied to the promotion of a hegemonic capitalist
ethos. Despite this, there is little doubt that HNIC has a “deeply
rooted, almost iconic place in Canadian culture” (Gruneau and
Whitson, 1993: 101). HNIC is consistently the CBC’s highest-rated
Canadian produced show, with typical Saturday night audiences
averaging 1.4 million viewers and its largest audience (4.96 million)
recorded during a June 1994 Stanley Cup final match between the
Vancouver Canucks and New York Rangers (Brown, n.d.). The men’s
ice hockey gold medal match from Salt Lake City was even more
popular, attracting a record audience of 10 million English- and
French-language viewers on the CBC (Houston, 2002).
Little research has interrogated the confluence of television, ice
hockey, and the Olympic Games. The most prominent exception to
this-and certainly the only production ethnography of televised
Olympic ice hockey-is the work of Margaret MacNeill (1996). She
examines CTV’s (a private Canadian broadcaster) production of the
Olympic ice hockey tournament at the 1988 Calgary Games. MacNeill
argues that two frameworks-the spectacle of accumulation and the
spectacle of legitimation-can be used to understand the ways in which
the Olympic Movement, corporate sponsors, and the media were
brought together within the telecasts. Production techniques familiar
to Canadian audiences were utilized to attract the widest possible
audience familiar with hockey telecasts while, at the same time, NHL
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