Discourse on Olympic Medals and Medalists

Abstract

　Aiming to clarify how Olympic medals and medalists are described in the media, I analyzed the contents of articles from the Asahi Shimbun.
　Analysis of the Japanese medalists clarified the following: Many of the acquired medals were for such sports as gymnastics, judo and wrestling. In recent years, female athletes played remarkably active roles in new Olympic sports.
　Winning Olympic medals has meant showing Japan’s national power to the world, and fostering medalists has been reported as being a national policy. Until the early 1970s, the media depicted medalists as having unparalleled guts and medalists were crowned with the title of superhuman. There was an image that the nation and individuals were connected through mentalism.
　As camps from both the east and west increasingly emphasized the display of national power that the Olympics fostered, medal acquisition using commercial capital became more and more firmly established as a national policy. The media during this period presented the following image: Athletes who fully displayed their abilities without being defeated by pressure were considered to be the ideal athletes.
　In the early 1990s new types of medalists appeared in the media. Reporting during this period often focused on medalists’ personal information. Such publicity presented the image that there was no longer a connection between medal acquisition as a national policy and individual medalists’ experiences. It is suggested that the progress of commercialism in sports and the diversification of the media will make the relationship between medal acquisition as a national policy and individual medalists increasingly more complicated and diverse in the future.