Gendered coverage of the Olympic Games in German print media: a longitudinal content analysis in the context of participation, success and disciplines

With more than 10,000 participants from all over the world competing in hundreds of events, the Olympic Games have relevance based on both their large scale and their omnipresence in the media, generated by approximately 30,000 international media representatives working on site. These figures raise the questions of what the mediated reality of the Olympic Games looks like and what central reference points shape this mediated reality. International studies on visual print media coverage often claim that sportswomen are still systematically underrepresented and content-related visualisations display gendered differences. Anchored in systems theory and agenda-setting theory, this article examines the visualisations of male and female Olympians in print media and the relevance of participation, success and disciplines to gender. The sample comprises a total of 3394 pictures from two daily German newspapers’ coverage of the Summer Olympics from 2000 to 2016. The longitudinal design allows analysing changes in the visual construction of gender in 21st-century sport media. The study results indicate growing marginalisation of female Olympians in recent decades and disprove that success is the most important news value in Olympic Games coverage.