Television, mediatization, and globalization of sport: the case of the first Olympic worldwide broadcast from Tokyo 1964

The 1964 Tokyo Olympics represent a turning point in the history of the mediatization of sport. Broadcast live globally via satellite, they marked the beginning of worldwide sports television and established a ritualistic model of collective media consumption. This article analyzes the television broadcast of the event as a “media event” (Dayan & Katz, 1992) and as the first example of globalized and spectacularized sport, analyzing together journalistic sources and vintage visual materials, through the framework of mediatization of sport (Frandsen 2020; Tirino 2019). The objective is to show how Tokyo 1964 sanctioned Japan’s rebirth in the post-war geopolitical context and laid the foundations for a new sports ritual on a planetary scale.