Page 103 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

92 • Sport, Media and Society

her service to the armed forces. Hills and Kennedy (2009) argued that the selection
of photographs depicted Holmes disrupting many categories: nation (a black woman

against the British flag); sexuality (the absence of a current romantic partner); gender
(the army career); ethnicity (the picture of a white mother with a black daughter);
class (the ordinary garden, the ordinary clothes, the extraordinary feat). The news-
paper presented Holmes’s relationship with Britishness as complicated—the text
described her as achieving her dreams ‘despite—or thanks to—the state of modern
Britain’ (Smith 2004: 3). This confusing sentiment was echoed in The Sunday Times,
which constructed a similarly incoherent narrative:

Her story is not one of being a minority, the only child in a family of five who is

black, the recipient of genes from a Jamaican father and an English mother. Nor
is it specifically about being one of the few mixed-race children growing up on a

council estate in Kent. But it is a fusion of those things, and a response in life to
being a more driven individual than her siblings, and a remarkable obsession to
push herself towards that podium. (Hughes 2004: 14)

Hills and Kennedy (2009) observed that the portrayal of Kelly Holmes, therefore,
demonstrated attempts by the media to relate her story using traditional narratives
of sporting success, femininity, class, ethnicity, sexuality and nation. Holmes’s

qualities and background, however, did not fit easily into these disrupting prevailing
discourses surrounding Olympic heroism within the British press. While elements
of traditional narrative frameworks were apparent in the press coverage of Holmes’s
victory, the instabilities and discontinuities within them indicated that Holmes’s
story could not be easily contained within dominant cultural constructions of sport
and heroism.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

• Sport journalists do more than report the news; they decide what counts
as news
• Different narrative forms are used to construct sport news, requiring us to
distinguish between sporting events and the way that the sport news story
is presented
• Rich meanings are produced in the sport press by the use of rhetorical de-
vices, multiple visual and linguistic signs and the construction of an imagi-
nary community of readers
• The connotations of the words and images used in newspapers combine to
frame the way that sportspeople and sport events can be understood