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ABSTRACT
The Swedish Sports Hero: Change and Stability in the Media Story of the
Swedish Sports Hero from 1920’s to the Present time
This thesis examines the media construction of five Swedish sports heroes, active from
the 1920’s to the beginning of the 2000’s. The analyses are based on the assumption that
sports heroes are social products that reflect the dominating ideals and values of a society
or culture, and that the media plays an important role in this process. Firstly, the media
provide the attention necessary for successful athletes to become publically known and,
secondly, they create the stories in which some athletes are represented as heroes while
others are represented as villains. The use of narrative theory in this thesis builds on the
idea that a story is not merely a way of presenting information, but a way of creating
meaning. A person becomes a hero when he or she is described as a hero in a heroic tale.
To analyze the media construction of sports heroes is thus to analyze the media stories of
them as heroes.
In order to examine and compare the construction of sports heroes in the media, articles
from daily press and magazines as well as broadcasts in radio and television have been
analyzed. The results show that although each of the five heroes were valued and
represented according to ideals and values specific of his or her time, there are
similarities in the media representation of them that suggest that there is some degree of
stability in the narrative of the Swedish sports hero over time. In many ways, the story of
the Swedish sports hero is still intact since the 1920’s. However, this story is an ideal
story and the process of constructing athletes as heroes has proved to be filled with
compromise and contradictions. It can be argued that the media is more concerned with
fitting the athletes into an already existing narrative of the Swedish sports hero than with
representing them as individuals.
Seen in a wider historical context, sports heroes represent an example of how national
identity is constructed in the media. National identity is, as many theorists have shown, a
dynamic and relational process. What is considered typically Swedish thus changes over
time and in different contexts. In this process the social status of sports heroes helps to
stabilize as well as legitimize dominating ideas of Swedish national identity.
Keywords: sports, hero, star, narrative, media, national identity,
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