Abstract

This article analyzes newspaper representations of Nordic neighboring countries at the 1994 winter Olympics. Held in Lillehammer, Norway, the games constituted an enormous sporting success for the Norwegians, while neighboring Finland and Sweden fared much worse, which led national media in all three countries to contemplate on the discrepancy. Focusing on the tension between national and macro-regional Nordic identities, this article argues that media neighbor-images did in fact not compromise the seemingly collision-bound norms of “national rivalry” and “Nordist friendship”. Instead, the two norms informed and enforced each other through the key concept of humor, which created a safe media space for an Olympic dramaturgy of “siblinghood” to play out in. The analysis complements previous research on Nordic identity through highlighting the importance of emotion, popular cultural narratives, and intra-national neighbor relations for the construction of Nordicness.

Highlights

  • During the 1994 Olympic Winter Games, the staggering difference in sporting success between the Norwegian host nation’s athletes and their counterparts from neighboring Finland and Sweden sparked discussions in newspapers from all three countries

  • As newspapers tend to do during Olympic games, they positioned their readers first and foremost as constituents of a nationally defined self, from whose vantage point it was supposedly difficult to feel good about another nation’s good fortune, or bad about their sorrows

  • Norden as a region functioned in ways that the nation could not have done, since the neighbor-representations allowed media audiences to cultivate relational emotions, both positive and negative

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Summary

Introduction

During the 1994 Olympic Winter Games, the staggering difference in sporting success between the Norwegian host nation’s athletes and their counterparts from neighboring Finland and Sweden sparked discussions in newspapers from all three countries. The two notions enforced each other through the key concept of humor, constructing a relationship between the nations that was distinctly neighborly and sibling-like By analyzing how this dynamic played out in newspaper representations of Norway, Sweden and Finland as Nordic neighbors at the 1994 Winter Olympics, the article provides new perspectives on the Nordic countries at the close of the 20th century. DN’s mention of the Finnish hockey bronze on a front-page headline was the only such feature focused on a bronze medal during the games (DN, front pages, February 12 to 28) Trivial as they may undoubtedly seem, these quantitative occurrences point towards interest in Nordic neighbors as a category, and make for engaging conversations with previously published research on sports, whose focus has predominately been the construction of the national self. What seems to be lacking compared with the postwar Swedish representations of Nordic Winter Olympic athletes, are explicit claims of Nordic superiority in relation to others

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