During the build-up to the 2004 Olympics in Athens, the organizers were quick to point out that the Games were “coming home”[1]. In the wake of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who re-introduced the Olympic Games in the late nineteenth century, the Greeks were once again taking up the long thread of Olympic history which made ancient Greece both a centre of civilization and the cradle of sports. Although sport appears to be “a trans-historical and trans-cultural phenomenon”[2], it has since been seen as “a Mediterranean invention”[3] – in the nineteenth century the region was seen as a geographical and cultural unity, distinguished by a form of determinism. Two cultures, one Mediterranean, the other sporting, both forged in the same crucible, could only get mixed up with each other. To the nobility of logical reasoning inherited from the ancient Greeks we have to mix something more trivial, “partisan passion”, often studied in Marseilles and Naples[4], but found in most football stadiums or basketball halls, especially in Greece, where commentators often call it simply “an expression of Mediterranean exuberance”. So stereotypes are superimposed on top of myths, which usually have little to do with historical reality. For in fact modern sports were developed thousands of kilometres from the shores of the Mediterranean, in England, among the elite classes during the 19^th century, that period of relentless industrialisation[5].

 

Nevertheless it is true that these images, which sport produces as well as feeds off, are part of the common memory specific to the Mediterranean which the historian cannot ignore. At the crossroads of cultural history and the history of international relations, sport gives us the chance to seize the challenges and the balance of power between unity and diversity of the Mediterranean region in the second half of the 20^th century.

 

It's a period marked by the media's growing influence and this, using the new broadcasting methods,[6] helped not only turn sport into spectacle, but also increased its capacity to mobilise people. An essential element in mass culture, and “a measure of a country's power and decline, as much a revealer as a manipulator of public feeling. Sport is at the centre of international life, integrated into a country's offensive and defensive strategies, a substitute for war but also instrument of diplomacy.”[7] In a region scarred by major and often painful geopolitical reconstructions after the collapse of colonization, at what was supposed to be the end of history,[8] opening up a “clash of civilizations”[9] because of the collapse of ideologies, sport is a preferred vehicle for asserting a people's identity at many different levels. Here are a few examples.

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