“Frozen bananas”: sport, media and Brazilian identity in the Winter Olympic Games

Abstract

What is the “grammar of identity ” engineered by the media to the construction of the Brazilian identity is in a set of sports that can hardly be considered popular in Brazil? We performed hermeneutical analysis of 25 newspaper reports of 2002 Winter Olympic Games from Folha de S.Paulo in order to identify the marks of national identity present in the texts. We noticed the difficulty to establish a sportive “iconic sign”, an emphasis on the ideas of chance and improvisation and the presence of ambivalent symbolic marks of identities based on the idea of hierarchies. These elements allow thinking about the formative complexity of national identity in Brazil.