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Sport and the Press • 87

intersecting themes of race, class, nation, gender and sexuality in the press coverage
of Kelly Holmes’s double gold medal–winning performance at the Athens Olympics.
The next section explores the way this event was mediated in the British press.

Case Study: All Gold—Kelly Holmes’s
Double Olympic Victory

The British athlete Kelly Holmes was an unexpected hero of the 2004 Olympics.
Hills and Kennedy (2009) argued that this was evident in the repeated theme of sur-
prise in newspaper reports. The News of the World (29 August 2004) followed their
back page headline of ‘Kelly’s All Goold’, substituting Olympic medals for the Os,
with ‘Double Has Her Gobsmacked’, drawing on her own words ‘I’m gobsmacked’
after the race. Page 3 of the Sunday Mirror presented a photograph of Holmes hold-
ing ‘her head in her hands, unable to take it all in’, with the headline, ‘I Can’t Believe
It . . . ’. The Sunday Times sport section ran a headline across pages 14 and 15 that

ANALYSING THE PRESS COVERAGE OF KELLY HOLMES’S VICTORIES
Kelly Holmes was an established British athlete who had been beset by repeated injury during her
career. She was thirty-four years old when she won gold medals in the 800-metre and the 1,500-
metre at the Athens Olympics in 2004. This was an historic accomplishment for British athletics.
Holmes’s medals were the fi rst British double gold for both events since Albert Hill had achieved
the same in the 1920 Olympics. These factors combined to make her victory both unexpected and
unprecedented in recent years. The day after Holmes’s second medal, her victories were reported in
the British Sunday newspapers.
We were struck by this coverage and wanted to compare the different reports. We decided to
collect newspapers that represented both populist tabloids and quality press, and occupied both
right and left of centre political positions. Our sample included, therefore, The News of the World,
the Sunday Mirror, The Observer and The Sunday Times. It was important to use the paper edition
of the newspaper to be able to analyse the placing of the story on the page and the way the event
was accompanied by photographs and other reports. We considered that the online editions of the
newspapers would not present the story in the same way since meaning accrues from the accumu-
lated intertextual associations of words and images both within the report and surrounding it. Online
newspapers give only the words of the story and sometimes an image, but they are removed from
their original context and fonts, and formatting and placement are altered.
Once we had decided on the newspapers, we located all references to Holmes throughout
paper, looking in all the various sections. We identifi ed repeated themes in the written reports,
paying attention to linguistic devices that were used to construct the story. We analysed the im-
ages using techniques from semiotics, drawing out the connotations of the varying depictions of
Holmes, her family and other athletes. We then considered the way that the words and images
interacted with each other to tie down the range of possible meanings. Finally, we analysed the
narratives that were constructed through the combination of these linguistic and photographic
codes and identifi ed the way that the Kelly Holmes story was made known to the reader in each
of the newspapers.