The cultural practice of sports spectatorship allows fans to not only watch the action of athletic competition, but also to identify vicariously with athletes. The spectator-athlete relationship, though sometimes a direct physical connection, is often mediated by screens. Whether on enormous stadium video boards or on home television sets, TV broadcasts foster communal ties around a collective purpose and emphasize a shared corporeal physicality. While the stadium assembles spectator bodies to visually interact with a ritual, at a certain scale, the limits of human vision are reached; only screens can collapse the distances between fans and players. The particular televisual appeal of sports derives from their matter-of-fact quality. Athletic competition communicates with an immediacy through its spectacular physicality, rendered even more visible on TV. Yet while broadcasts increase our ability to physically relate to athletes—we see their sweat and feel their emotions—the televised image can also minimize or sanitize the real violence of competition. Increased visibility is not the only motivation for screens, which also provide entertainment during games and present enormous advertising possibilities. But even in the consumerist spectacle of televised sport, these gatherings hold the capacity to facilitate greater communal bonds. The screen may alienate and atomize its viewers, but it also has the possibility to bring fans together not only around a shared desire—winning—but also around a shared understanding of embodied existence. Television pictures of heroic athletic performances thus carry similar ambitions of the images of saints painted in church frescoes to communicate and inform the faithful. This paper will investigate the television broadcast of sports to better understand the ways these images structure both vicarious corporeal identification and collective gathering around a shared communal motivation.