Sports-as-Spectacle and Sporting Spectacle:Roland Barthes’ Semiotic Analysis of Sport Events

Roland Barthes,the great French philosopher and semiotician,developed a special interest in spectator sports and influential public sport events.He published a number of articles on sports-as-spectacle and sporting spectacle.In "The World of Wrestling",the first essay in his Mythologies,Barthes gave a micro-semiotic analysis to wrestling.In "The Tour de France as Epic",also collected in the same book,he went a step further and,through meso-semiotic analysis,discussed the general significations demonstrated in the bicycle racing in France.Barthes' relatively complete semiotic views on sport events are embodied in "What is Sport",the script he wrote for a Canadian documentary film called Le Sport et les hommes which attempts to explore the phenomenology and poetics of five national sports.