Mídia, esporte e idolatria: o Jornal do Brasil e a representação dos atletas brasileiros nos jogos olímpicos

Abstract

In a broad sense, it s discussed in this dissertation the representation of the Olympic hero in the Jornal do Brasil newspaper in the second half of the twentieth century. My preliminary hypothesis, following the conclusion of Helal, Cabo and Marques (2009), is that, unlike what happens in World Cups, during the Olympics, sports journalists would tend to use a different text framework to describe their object of analysis (the sports ant the athletes) and to construct life stories. While the heroes coming from football would be provided with a natural talent and training would occupy a seconday position in the victorius narratives, the heroes of the so called amateur sports would achieve glory through the selfless efforts and dedication to training. Through an analysis of the narratives, having as corpus of research the editions of the Sports Section of the referred newspaper over the thirteen Olympics of the second half of the twentieth century from Helsinque to Sydney-1952-2000 , I verify the validity of this conjecture.