As representações visuais da beleza atlética olímpica : da antiguidade ao instagram

Abstract

Based on Olympic athletes’ images, this thesis investigates how such type of athletic beauty (GUMBRECHT, 2007) has been visually represented throughout the millenary history of the Olympic Games. Thus, the study primarily aims to establish the possible continuities and ruptures of these representations. The secondary objectives are: a) to define the concept of ‘Olympic Athletic Beauty’ and its differences between the Ancient and Modern Games; b) to establish the continuities and ruptures among the visual representations of the Ancient and Modern Athletic Beauty; c) to analyze the development behind the exploring process of the athletes’ image throughout Olympic history. The corpus of analyzed photographs are 588 archaeological artifacts related to the Ancient Games, as well as more than 80 thousand photographs published on the official Instagram profiles of 389 Olympic athletes who pursued classification to Tokyo 2020 Olympics. The selection criteria considered only individual events related to the Summer Editions between the years of 2012 and 2020. The thesis is divided into five chapters: (1st) the Introduction; (2nd) the Theoretical Framework, including methodological concepts of the Digital Humanities and Cultural Analytics (MANOVICH, 2020), as well as the perspectives on beauty in Antiquity and Modernity to enclose the understanding regarding sports, athletics and Olympic point of views; (3rd) the Methodological Aspects, included the computational tools used in the study, such as the GENUS, an authorial platform; (4th) the Analysis of the collected images, including the two main analyzed Olympic Games periods (Antiquity and Modernity), take into consideration the visual, the thematic and the interpretative aspects; and (5th) the Final Remarks. The study results understand that ‘Olympic Athletic Beauty’ visual representations have been gradually moved away from the classical thoughts regarding Olympic ideal, gradually reinforcing, a utilitarian (commercial/economic) characteristic of professional and competitive modern sport. Over time, these athletes’ imagery representations have been fulfilling an important cultural media role in the Olympic context. However, when these images are analyzed into the communicational concept, a series of characteristics can be highlighted regarding the interpretative conceptions of a mediatized process, i.e., the aspects referring to elements such as: a) visual/artistic media; b) related to sport victories and achievements; and c) economic aspects.