Media coverage of Olympic women focuses on ?acceptable? bodies and sports; plays down accomplishments

Sexy goddesses or iron “girls?”  When it comes to Olympic women athletes, media rarely give women fair coverage. Successful women Olympians, however, do get media coverage, but their sporting achievements are framed with additional narratives that often focus on the appearance and the shape of the women athletes’ bodies. In addition, successful women in so-called “acceptable” or “sex-appropriate” female sport tend get more media attention than women in so -called “masculine” sports.

According to the authors of a new book, Olympic Women and the Media: International Perspectives, “The masculine sports are the ones that exhibit size, power, strength, speed, contact. The sports that are considered ‘womanly’ or ‘feminine’ are the ones that are graceful. They might include a light implement, but no contact,” explains Pirkko Markula, a professor of socio-cultural studies of sport and leisure in the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation at the University of Alberta, who edited and contributed to the book.  She adds that “acceptable” sports would include  sports like archery, badminton, swimming and diving, rhythmic gymnastics, gymnastics, synchronized swimming, or (beach) volleyball.

The book examines media coverage of women athletes at the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004 from the perspectives of 11 researchers from around the globe looking at how different countries’ media covered their national women athletes. Through ‘case’ studies of individual Olympic athletes’ representation in newspapers around the world, the authors demonstrate the media’s tendency to narrate women athletes through their “looks,” their relationships, their injuries, or their ethnicities rather than their achievements.

The book includes examples such as Dame Kelly Holmes, the British runner who unexpectedly won gold in both the 800m and 1500m in Athens. Coverage ranged from hailing her as “the most successful female runner this country has ever had” to vivid descriptions of her injury-ridden “broken-body” and likened her to an animal or an inanimate object: “enough injuries to condemn a horse to the knackers’ yard” and “her pace akin to a Ferrari.” Tabloid media attempted to sexualize Holmes, taking photos of her in an alluring evening dress on a country estate, out of the context of her career as a sergeant in the British army, or as an athlete. When she disastrously appeared in a TV dance program called “Dancing on Ice” in which athletes were paired with figure skaters, Holmes was told by one of the judges that she was so vigorous she risked looking like a “man in drag.”

Media also delved into her background, dredging up an errant father from Jamaica, and focusing its attention on his desertion of his family and philandering, behaviours that could be ascribed to the working-class and thereby drawing attention to Holmes’ blackness that made her “not quite British.” 

A chapter on China finds that while Chinese women’s sports received more coverage than men’s sports  did overall (34.46 per cent to 31.88 per cent, and because they won more medals), media trivialized women’s achievements and favoured the “acceptable female sports.” Women athletes in diving were portrayed as “sexy goddesses,” such as gold-medallist Guo Jingling. Media described her as the “Beautiful Goddess of the Springboard” while also describing her as “ordinary” and “shy” and fabricated her romantic involvement with a fellow diver on the men’s team. Women in weight-lifting, however, were described as “beautiful on the inside” as their larger, more muscular forms did not conform to the accepted norms of Chinese female beauty.  Athletes themselves said they were beautiful only if they were successful.

Chinese women athletes were also portrayed as successful only because of their male coaches and trainers who were in turn portrayed as all-important mentors, protectors and father figures to whom the athletes turned to be consoled or congratulated; in many cases, these males spoke for the female athletes. Much was made of any displays of emotion or tears, and interpreted in the media as being unstable, weak or inferior. “(Athletes) appeared more like disconsolate babies than adult women,” wrote researcher Ping Wu (University of Bedfordshire.)

In the Dutch media researchers examined how three women athletes of different ethnicities fared. Celebrated white swimmer Inge de Bruijn, badminton player Mia Audina, Indonesian-born and a recent immigrant to Holland, and judoka Deborah Gravenstijn, a Dutch athlete, but considered black, were all hailed as heroines for winning medals, but media coverage revealed clear biases based on their ethnicity.

“DeBrujn, the typical white Dutch woman, was portrayed in a sexualized manner, in bikinis, with coiffed hair, make-up and sunglasses,” says Markula. “She was represented as the female ideal of typical female beauty. She was muscular and flat-chested but she was still celebrated. Very sexualized and portrayed as a spoilt diva type.”

Audina, though hailed as a heroine, was “portrayed as an athlete but at the same time like an immigrant – having to be serious and work hard.”

“Gravenstejn was celebrated as a strong black woman but also as innocent, a nice woman. It meant that the last two couldn’t be celebrated as sexy but because they did get medals they were celebrated in some manner. One was stereotypical Dutch-looking whereas others were not and portrayed differently, as somehow less desirable.”

Markula says though the researchers looked at coverage of female athlete at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Beijing in 2008 showed that not much progress had been made.

“To this day we have very strong ideas that still underlie the notion of feminine and masculine qualities and the sports that go with those. If you are in a feminine sport, you are expected to have those feminine qualities,” says Markula.

What remains to be seen, in light of this new knowledge, is how women athletes will fare in the media in Vancouver at a winter Olympic Games, where all bodies are typically covered up. Also, if the lines are less defined between so-called men’s and women’s winter sports, will media portray female athletes fairly? With no beach volleyball to distract them, it may happily be the case.

• “Olympic Women and the Media: International Perspectives” is available from Amazon.com, Palgrave Connect, Palgrave Macmillan and Barnes & Noble, among others.