[MUSIC]. [BLANK_AUDIO]. Hello. This lesson will deal with the Olympic Games and the media, two realities that have evolved together. The modern Olympic games since the very first moment have had a close relationship with the media. In fact, the father of the modern Olympic games, Pierre de Coubertin, had since the very first moment a close relationship with newspapers and journalists. He was a great communicator. He wrote in newspapers frequently. He was a public relations man who knew the capacity of media for transmitting ideas. During the closing address of the 1894 Congress of La Sorbonne, where the Olympics Games were reinstated, Pierre De Coubertin thanked the press for the decisive importance of its support in the success of that first congress. In the same speech he acknowledged that the cause of Olympianism was a revolutionary cause. And the press supported that cause as, they supported the fair revolution of those days. The words of Pierre de Coubertin were the following: The adherents of the old school groaned when they saw us holding our meeting in the heart of the Sorbonne: They realised that we were rebels and that we would finish by casting down the edifice of their worm-eaten philosophy. It is true, gentlemen. We are rebels, and that is why the press which has always supported beneficent revolutions has understood and helped us, for which, by the way, I thank it with all my heart. There are some points that I'd like to highlight. The first one is that the old academia did not consider the first Olympic congress something that deserved to be debated at the noble and historical university. Second. Pierre de Coubertin considered himself together with those who attended the congress as rebels, insurgents who wanted to change the status quo. He also considered the first mass media, the press, as the first deliverers of the ideas. We will come back during the second week with these issues and many more that are related with the importance of the media in the consolidation, globalization, and the funding of the Olympic Movement. This has been only a sample that underlies the decisive role of media in the consolidation and development of this utterly important phenomenon that are the Olympic Games. At the same time I would like to quickly highlight why the media's so important for the Olympics. We will deepen into this issue during the following weeks, but let me I advance to you some aspects. First of all, we need to acknowledge that the Olympics are a global phenomenon thanks to the capacity of media, the overall audio visual media, but television in particular, to create worldwide realities. Secondly, television, the media with more presence in our homes is the main funder of the Olympic Games. Thirdly, media in general, television in particular constructs the way we conceive, interpret, or understand the world in which we are living. Probably I don't need to justify in depth why this course we will be devoted to media, in general, and we will be mainly focused on television and new media. Four billion people around the world watch the Olympic Games on television. More than 85% of the incomes of the Olympic Games and the International Olympic Committee come from communication and television as we will explain in detail during the following weeks. The perspective of the following course is multidisciplinary because we can not speak about the complex reality as the Olympics from an angle focused only in communication or journalism. The philosophy, the economy, the history and the communication studies are disciplines that will be present during the next weeks, along with the different approaches to the object that we are going to analyze together. We conceive these course as an attempt to tackle the complexity that lies in the Olympic Games and their relationship with the media. To acknowledge the complexity of our subject is to admit that they exist great number of actors and forces in the issue which influence each other. We will see this, for example, when we discuss the social media environment of the Olympic Family, or the relationship of interdependence when we talk about the funding structure of the Olympic Games. This approach is intimately associated with the mentioned multi-disciplinary aim of the issue. Even though, before dealing with the specific subject of this course, it is necessary to explain which is the context in which we are going to travel during the following weeks. What the Olympic Games are, when they were established. Which are the historical predecessors or how the International Olympic Committee governs itself or which is its role in the running of the Olympics, among other issues. [BLANK_AUDIO]