The Australian Olympic caravan from 2000 to 2012. A unique Olympic events industry
which the citizens of Bergen, Norway experienced something akin to transcendence. A taxi in Bergen town centre, for example, is vested with religious value. Mundane items, like cakes, socks and cups of coffee, ‘are profane objects which reveal the sacred’, according to Dahlén. ‘This is only possible when human beings inscribe sacred significance to select profane objects’ (p. 78). He concludes: ‘Life in Bergen changed, if only for a short period of time’; until the start of the next football season, to be precise. It is a heady narrative and one that reminds us that, even in the corporatised twenty-first century when football and, practically every sport, has been surrendered to the service of market forces, when sport is a commercial activity valued in terms of its profitability more than its intrinsic merit, and when competitors play for no higher purpose than to enrich themselves, there remain vestiges of a communion in which sharing and exchanging is as palpable as it was three millennia ago.