While these fanciful images feed the misconception, the mechanics of the situation reveal that the Colossus could not have straddled the harbour as described in Lemprière's Classical Dictionary.
The coach of Greece called him 'the Colossus of Rhodes' in respect of his performances in the tournament and the moniker is now widely used in the press.
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An alternative memorial to him never materialised: a massive "colossus of Rhodes" statue overlooking Cape Town from the summit of Lion's Head, rather like the statue of Christ overlooking Rio de Janeiro.
In the 2009 hip-hop song "The New Colossus" by Kinetics & One Love, rapper Kinetics loosely references lines from the Lazarus poem and raps about the Statue of Liberty as well as the Colossus of Rhodes, on which the poem is based.