Speaker
Description
Elite-level women’s artistic gymnastics is (in)famous for the youth of its competitors. Commentators describe gymnasts beyond their early twenties as exceptionally old for competition. Here we examine media coverage of 40+ year-old gymnast Oksana Chusovitina, asserting that age representation constructs the limits and possibilities of sport. We conducted content analysis of 16 international competitions in which Chusovitina competed, from 2001 to 2021. As hegemonic masculinity structures a gender order in sport and beyond, we argue that gymnastics coverage constructs an age order in the sport that normalizes youth by (1) drawing distinctions between older and younger competitors, emphasizing the extreme youth of younger competitors; (2) focusing on athletes’ private lives, including their positions as mothers (in the case of Chusovitina) or daughters (in the case of younger competitors); and (3) constructing the athlete-coach relationship as familial, where coaches are represented as surrogate parents. These techniques diminish the agency of young gymnasts and produces their youthfulness as hegemonic, treating athletes competing beyond their twenties as unworthy of serious attention. When older athletes are categorized as outliers, the sports media is free to infantilize younger gymnasts, naturalizing the sport’s high burn-out and injury rate, and devaluing the accomplishments of gymnasts beyond their twenties.
