From aesthetics to athletics: women’s representation in the Spanish press during the Olympics

Abstract

This paper reviews the most illustrative examples of how female Olympic athletes have been represented in the Spanish press across the last three Olympic Games (Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020, Paris 2024), identifying a clear evolution from more stereotyped portrayals toward representations reflecting more egalitarian social models. To this end, we draw on various studies addressing the under-representation of women in the sports press (Barbero González, 2015, 2017; Jimeno López, 2021; Ríos Urdaneta and Sainz de Baranda Andújar, 2023; Rojas-Torrijos and Ramón, 2021; Sainz de Baranda Andújar, 2013), as well as the ways in which female athletes are discussed in highly stereotypical terms (Guerrero Salazar, 2017). Women are described with reference to their beauty, physical characteristics, and personal lives, often in infantilizing terms and through narratives or images that are sexualizing. These findings align with those of a study conducted by Cambridge University Press (Grieves, 2016), based on the analysis of more than 160 million words from the Cambridge English Corpus and the Sports Corpus. The study revealed that descriptions of female athletes prioritized aesthetic aspects over athletic performance, with a significant gap in the adjectives typically used for men (fast, strong) versus women (single, beautiful). In order to identify the evolution from these stereotypes to more recent and egalitarian representations—resulting from efforts to provide higher-quality sports journalism and increased feminist awareness—we analyze a range of examples of female Olympic athletes from the last three editions of the Games (Lydia Valentín, Simone Biles, Ana Peleteiro, Paula Badosa, Carolina Marín, María Xiao, among others) across four digital sports media outlets (As, Marca, Sport, Mundo Deportivo) and six general Spanish news outlets (El País, El Mundo, ABC, Eldiario.es, La Razón, El Español). The analysis of these ten media sources reveals a shift in the coverage of women’s Olympic sports toward more egalitarian models.