Inside the Promotional Vortex

Abstract

When Canadian Simon Whitfield won the gold medal in the first ever Olympic Men’s 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 demonstrate 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 newspapers, and which served in the construction of media and marketing coverage of Whitfield that affirmed dominant meanings of sport culture in Canada.