A reprodução dos megaeventos esportivos nos BRCS: espetáculo e exceção

Abstract

In 2001 Jim O'Neill coined the term that would cause a lot of changes at the beginning of the 21st century, the BRIC, a group of countries composed of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, respectively, each letter of the acronym. The initiative to create it was based on the economic potential that they could obtain throughout the beginning of the century. With the unrolling of the years, the predictions would end up being confirmed and they will consolidate as global players and, in the meantime, BRIC had become something much bigger thar O'Neill should had thought, moving from an economic concept to a symbol of the emerging countries, in addition to transforming itself into BRICS, because of the entry of South Africa to the group. Furthermore, other processes will highlight them internationally, all of them (except India) were host of sporting mega-events, like the FIFA World Cup or the Summer or Winter Olympics. Hosting a mega-event is the starting point for the work to come. We will argue that there are several similarities in socio-spatial practices regarding the reproduction of sporting megaevents in these countries. Reproduction process which is directly linked with the regime that is hegemonic in contemporaneity, neoliberalism. From our understanding, we can observe that, in neoliberalism, cities are understood as individuals acting like entrepreneurs, in a context of interurban competition. This is happening during the crisis in their revenues, in view of the austerity regime they often find themselves in. For us, the consolidation of neoliberalism in relation to sporting mega-events is constituted and reproduced by two mechanisms: the spectacle, expanding the domination of the market-form in space and in everyday life, and the exception, tearing apart the popular participation and catalyzing authoritarian and violent urban and state regimes. We will argue that this process is constituted by a relationship of conflicts and socio-spatial tensions, which are developed in a trans-scalar manner. It is up to this work to carve and shed light on the development of this processes in the countries and in the host cities, more specifically in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, Sochi, Beijing, and Cape Town, each one of them respectively to one of the countries of the BRCS. With this, we will seek to study here our understanding of the BRCS, the development of neoliberal processes in the Global South, the role of cities in entrepreneurship, the relationship between spectacle and exception with the reproduction of mega-events and, finally, the similarities in socio-spatial practices in the reproduction of sporting mega-events in the BRCS.