"The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees."
"Thus the function of the wrestler is not to win; it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him."
"It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theater."
http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~ikalmar/illustex/Barthes-wrestling.htm
