It is only through communication that physical activity becomes sport. Sport as an activity becomes a meaningful event through the interplay of dramaturgical rules and rhetorical patterns. Working from this point of departure, this study reveals how the sports report serves to realize the possibilities of sport. The sports report tells stories, and these stories are the actual reason why sports exist. Particularly in elite sports communicated by mass media, this leads to illuminating, amusing, or moving dramas in the arena of physical and mental achievement.

Johannes Heil, Tübingen.