OLYMPIC GAMES AS A DIGITAL MEDIA PRODUCT

This paper studies the development of economic ties between professional sports and media in the past ten years by the example of the Olympic Games media coverage. The main purpose of the research is to identify the regularities that are formed in the communicative environment of elite sports. The paper is focused on the Olympic Games as the global sports events that include several types of sports competitions. The subject of the study is the sport as a product. The object of the study is the sport entertainment products in the media sphere. The relevance of the research is that the interconnections between sports and media expand and change rapidly and are influenced not only by the development of new technologies but also by a coronavirus situation. The systematization of literary sources on the selected matter indicated the need for further studies to reflect the rampant evolution of sports media and the lack of unified terminology for viewing professional sports through the prism of mass media as a media product. The methodology of the research is based on the analysis of open-source statistical data and a set of empirical materials (official websites of sports organizations, TV channels, and social media pages). The author viewed these materials from four perspectives: the audience, the marketing approach, the sports themselves as a source of information, the mainstream and the new media. The results allowed identifying the main trends of the information space formation around the object understudy. These trends prove that the structure of the Elite Sports media product is becoming more complex, and the number of communicative links and broadcasting opportunities of sports events has increased. Finally, the author proposed a conceptual model of representing professional sports as a media product on the example of the major sports events, through defining its communication links. The findings of the research could be useful for setting vectors for studying mainstream and new media in the chosen area. The study can be of interest to sports journalists, bloggers, managers, and officials.