Stages of the global : media, sport, racialization and the last temptation of Zinedine Zidane

Major sport spectacles are probably the most potent, vibrant stages on which human drama can be played out in real time before a vast international audience. Media sport, through global scale ‘frozen moments’, can precipitate popular interrogations of ‘race’ and its myriad connections to other socio-cultural structures and identities. This article considers the case of the now infamous incident of French captain Zinedine Zidane head-butting the Italian Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup Final of association football in Germany, as a striking example of the political resonance and reach of mega-media sport, as well as of the perils of being ‘lost’ and ‘found’ in popular media translation. The persistence and pervasiveness of sexism in the language and metaphor of racism, it is argued, is an essential ingredient of the ‘sexual racism’ within the patriarchal genre of sports field insults. The immediate speculation and intense search for ‘signs’ of racism in the Zidane-Materazzi affair reveals that it lurks close below the surface of contemporary sport. This article advocates a cultural politics that understands and resists the causes of racism through sport, just as it refuses to legitimize racialized categories of the human in the process.