Inside the promotional vortex: Canadian media construction of Sydney Olympic triathlete Simon Whitfield. International Review for the Sociology of Sport
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Triathlon at the 2000 Sydney Games, the Canadian media labeled him an ‘Olympic champion ’ and ‘golden boy ’ and constructed his victory as ‘heroic ’ and emblematic of Canadian character. Positive media attention led to several sponsorship contracts which in turn led to more media coverage about his success, with the result that Whitfield became a media celebrity and product endorser in Canada. In this article we examine the media production processes that led to the construction of Whitfield’s positive media image and the impact of this coverage on his marketability. Through interviews with five national and regional newspaper journalists who wrote stories about Whitfield and four national marketers who worked on his sponsorship campaigns, as well as with Whitfield himself, we demon-strate how media and marketing production are linked as part of a promotional chain. In the case of Whitfield, this promotional chain resulted in media coverage that was similar across various news-papers, and which served in the construction of media and marketing coverage of Whitfield that affirmed dominant meanings of sport culture in Canada. Key words • intertextuality • Olympic Games • promotional culture • sport journalism • sport marketing
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".