The Advent of Sport Celebrities: How to Analyze the Celebrity Phenomena in Soviet Union

Abstract

The making of celebrities became an issue of sociological and historical researches recently. This article aims at analyzing how sporting celebrities appeared in the Soviet Union. It highlights the process of the edification of sportsmen, how they became celebrities and how that could be problematic in a socialist state. This article shows that the promotion of sportsmen started to be an issue of symbolic struggle. It first explains that sports celebrities appeared during the tsarist era and what kinds of debates sporting celebrities have launched. After the revolution, sporting celebrities were denounced and were considered as marks of the ancient capitalist world and from professionalism. As spectator sport grew in the Soviet Union and as the sports policy evolved, some sportsmen became a role model and examples for the Soviet citizen. They embodied new values, but these values evolved during the Soviet period. This article explains in a second part how the making of celebrities happened and what kinds of channels were used to make sportsmen 'known to people whom they don't know'. The third part of this article explains how in the 1950s and in the 1960s the edification of the sportsman as an example, the rise of spectator sport and the growing mediatization created a massive gap between sporting heroes, celebrities promoted by sports and political organs, and unofficial celebrities that rose from mass mobilization and fandom.