Un mito d'oggi: Roland Barthes e lo sport

The paper aims to probe the socio-cultural meaning of Roland Barthes’ studies about sports and their communicative impact on audience. To the fore is the relationship between semiology, sociology of culture and communication, in the era marked by the transformation of sports in a contemporary myth, bolstered by media innovations. In particular, the paper focuses on the texts arranged by Barthes for the Canadian director Aubert Aquin who asked the former to help him in the making of his documentary focused on the social dimension of sports. Barthes’ Les sport et les homes (1960-1961) poses as a prosecution of Mythologies (1957). In this sense, the paper outlines a socio-cultural reflection on the social impact of two specific sports, catch and cycling, interpreted by Barthes in accordance with his semiological and aesthetic sensitivity. The main purpose is to demonstrate how sports turned into a real collective show in the era of connected and reticular interactions, marked by the symbolic complexity of our post-modernity. For this reason, Barthes can help us understand the sociological shifts fuelled by the consumer society in the field of mass entertainment that sports keep on influencing and animating.