Policing the “Russian diva”: gymnastics broadcasts and the idealisation of the girl-child athlete

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the “Russian diva,” a label used by media within specific periods of Women’s Artistic Gymnastics. In using it, broadcasters created rival gymnastics femininities and reinforced gymnastics’ gender norms by rendering the rebellious and emotional diva as a behavioural anomaly and the disciplined US girl-child as the behavioural ideal. This created a symbolic, two-fold marginalisation whereby self-determination and emotional displays were rendered aberrant, and docility and submission to paternal authority was normalised. Situated in the context of recent revelations about the silencing and oppression of girls in artistic gymnastics globally, this analysis is guided by Nura Taefi’s (2009) call for the use of an intersectional lens that considers the overlooked interplay of gender and age and the unique forms and sometimes subtle forms of marginalisation the girl-child can face. It also seeks to fill a gap in feminist sports media research by contributing to the understanding of how elite-level sporting girlhood has been rendered over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Gymnastics
• sport
• media
• intersectionality
• girlhood

Introduction

In 2012, as a US Olympic broadcast captured the Russian team marching out to compete in the qualifying session of the Women’s Artistic Gymnastics (WAG) competition, viewers were told that the nation’s star athlete represented the continuance of a “tradition” of Russian gymnasts. This was followed by a tongue-in-cheek colour package characterising and historicising the “Russian diva.” This character, while possessing the ability to be the best, could be temperamental, expect adulation, and might be petulant to criticism, according to the voiceover (NBC 2012). The “diva” label first appeared in media coverage of gymnastics in the late 1990s around Russian gymnastics star, Svetlana Khorkina. During this decade, the Balkanisation of the Soviet Union had seen the formation of new countries, and the splitting of the dominating Soviet gymnastics program into smaller national teams, including the Russian team. In the late 1990s, some Russian gymnasts began to break with the dominant “pixie” girl-child mould—both in competitive success and behaviour—popularised by Communist bloc nations in the late 1970s and beloved by US audiences (Georgia Cervin 2021) both. In this same period, partly because of growing participation in the sport and an influx of coaching expertise from former Eastern-bloc nations, the US gymnastics program began to gain competitive dominance, resulting in the nation’s first team Olympic gold in 1996.

In sports coverage, patriotic sentiments frequently operate through “us and them” narratives that emphasise inherent differences between home and competing nations (Fabrice Desmarais and Toni Bruce 2008). Even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ann Chisholm (1999) observed how US gymnastics broadcasts perpetuated a Cold War tradition of placing a premium on the defeat of Russians/Soviets and evoked pride in home-nation athletes. The flamboyant and rebellious “Russian diva,” as described in the 2012 US Olympic broadcast, stood in stark contrast to the feminine ideal traditionally underlying media depictions of US gymnasts as “vulnerable yet invincible ‘little girls’” (Andaluna Borcila 2000, 200). Girls who, Ann Chisholm (2002) argues, had been routinely infantilised and constituted by domestic media as androgynous and unthreatening. This paper argues that, in perpetuating these stereotypes, broadcasts reinforced paternalistic notions about what behaviours and attributes constituted appropriate sporting femininity within the cultural and gendered landscape of WAG, a sport in which little girls had been considered ideal both for physique and behaviour for decades, despite the rise in the average ages of WAG athletes over time.

Sports broadcasts not only frame viewers’ understanding of sports and athletes but also have a constitutive effect. I argue that the Russian diva character, while lauded for her talent by broadcasters, was, at times, constituted through these narratives as a kind of cautionary tale. In doing so, commentators contributed to discourses that limited and constrained possibilities for girl athletes’ autonomy. This paper situates this analysis within the recent discourse about WAG athletes’ autonomy following a spate of claims by gymnasts worldwide about oppressive and authoritative elite training environments. It is against this backdrop that a feminist analysis of media coverage is salient, to understand how elite gymnastics girlhood has been rendered over time. Further to this, this paper also argues that an intersectional approach (see Kimberlé Crenshaw 1989), one which accounts for the effects of both age and gender, is needed in feminist media research into sports where young girls train and compete at elite levels. Only this approach can account for how girls’ rights may also be denied via cultural norms that reinforce adult, and often male, dominance (Taefi 2009).

The gymnast “girl-child” and intersectional theory

Toni Bruce’s (2016) extensive literature review demonstrates the depth and breadth of scholarly scrutiny of media representations of women in sports. However, while decades of research have explored how elite sportswomen have been marginalised at the intersections of gender, race, class and ethnicity, age has been overlooked as an explicit factor. This is despite the presence of several sports where girls have frequently competed at elite levels. This paper examines elite artistic gymnastics from an intersectional feminist perspective that considers the relationality of age and gender in a form of symbolic marginalisation that occurred in mediated sports. Historically, WAG gymnasts have been particularly subject to the constraints of ideals of appropriate femininity which have been encoded into a sport marked by gendered differences (Jan Wright 1991) and which developed in a manner that was “removed from the priorities of feminism” (Cervin 2021, 2). This idealised femininity has also been widely associated with girl children, and a significant proportion of female gymnasts’ elite careers can occur during childhood.

Intersectionality, coined by Crenshaw (1989), draws attention to how human experiences are shaped simultaneously by multiple factors that can contribute to oppression. With roots in Black feminism, scholars have explored how race and gender “collude to constrain the lives of black women” (Jennifer Nash 2019, 9). The term has since had significant interdisciplinary purchase in women’s studies, becoming “a gathering place for open-ended investigation of the overlapping and conflicting dynamics of race, gender, class, sexuality, nation and other inequalities” (Nina Lykke, as quoted in Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Leslie McCall 2013, 788). The idea that phenomena such as race, gender and class are maintained through entirely interconnected “relational processes” is long established in intersectional thought (Patricia Hill Collins 2019, 226). While there have been questions about what elements of identity can be examined through an intersectional lens, Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall (2013) argue that the scope of its application and the ways it has been deployed have only clarified its capacities and “amplified its generative focus as an analytical tool to capture and engage contextual dynamics of power” (788). While Kathy Davis (2008) suggests the term has become a buzzword, characterised by its vagueness, Nash (2019, 11) argues that the success of intersectionality is found in its capacity to allow analytical import, and as a term that is neat and coherent while still able to describe complexity.

Research interest in the intersection of age and gender has largely been constrained to aspects of aging and womanhood. However, at the turn of the century, Barrie Thorne (2004) noted the potential for intersectional analysis in childhood studies. Leena Alanen (2016) acknowledged its burgeoning application in discussions of the intersections of childhood with disability (see Dan Goodley 2013) and race (see Kalwant Bhopal and John Preston 2012). An intersectional lens provides a mode of understanding the plurality of discourses that not only construct femininity and childhood but privilege and oppress certain expressions of embodied identity within the sporting context of WAG. Specifically, it can attend to how broadcast narratives are marked by attitudes to the socially constructed categories of girlhood and womanhood.

This paper is theoretically informed by (Taefi’s 2009) paper, which draws attention to the “girl-child” in international human rights law. Taefi ascribes an ongoing failure to articulate the rights of girls to a lack of an intersectional approach that accounts for both age and gender (ibid). This can be attributed to the way that issues that affect girl-children may be eclipsed by issues that are of more general concern to either children or women, thus fragmenting girl-children’s experiences in a way that may not capture “the lived experience of their multiple oppressions” (346). Intersectionality was first used to redress neglect of a Black female experience in a gender studies corpus focused on white women and a race studies corpus focused on black men (Leslie McCall 2005). Similarly, for Taefi (2009), the neglect of the girl-child is a result of a feminist research corpus focused on women and a childhood studies corpus that tends to be narrowly issue-based—particularly those related to children in the developing world. While vital objects of study, the scope of this approach is limited, and may inadvertently marginalise or overlook less conspicuous but nonetheless “grave” experiences of girls in the developed world (347). In the case of WAG, only an intersectional approach that considers both gender and age as structures of disempowerment can begin to consider how claims of abuse and oppression of girls have abounded within gymnastics. Similarly, an intersectional approach can also examine how broadcast narratives reinforced certain behavioural and competitive ideals connected to both age and gender in women’s elite gymnastics.

Gymnasts at the intersection of age and gender

The Russian diva character did not exist in isolation in US gymnastics coverage but alongside, and as a counter to, the “cute contortionist” embodied by US WAG athletes (Chisholm 2002). Gymnastics is rare in that many elite-level participants are under 18 (Rachel Lara Cohen 2013). For decades, girls’ elite international careers could begin, and occasionally even end, before gymnasts reached adulthood. This was due to a shift towards “acrobatisation” in the 1970s, when many gymnasts became smaller, younger, and therefore less womanly, and artistic gymnastics became less emotionally expressive and graceful in favour of a more precise, robotic style (Natalie Barker-Ruchti 2009), despite sustained resistance from within its governing body (see Cervin 2021). Barker-Ruchti (2009) attributes this acrobatisation to an inventive sporting atmosphere that evolved in the Eastern Bloc and later influenced the West, which demanded body types suited to aerial dynamics. For Wendy W Varney (2004), the girl-child gymnasts’ appeal lay in the fact that “it is not as women that they display their strength and daring, but as children. Children who flirt with the audience, who disguise their effort as play” (63). Barker-Ruchti (2009) claims that the girl-child gymnast became an ideal not only insofar as the prepubescent girl could perform difficult, circus-like elements, but also because “the immature minds of such young girls could be moulded and manipulated” to learn skills and train long hours (50).

This pixie model of artistic gymnastics training has led to instances of authoritarian elite coaching and gymnasts’ vulnerability to exploitation and abuse (N Kerr Roslyn, A Barker-Ruchti, G. Cervin Schubring, M Nunomura and M Nunomura 2019). Over time, there have been gradual increases in the minimum age required to compete in senior elite competitions. However, an analysis of news coverage of artistic gymnastics after the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) raised the competitive age, found that coaches and officials continued to use infantilising terms when speaking about gymnasts to media (Andrew Billings, James R Angelini, Paul J MacArthur, Kimberly Bissell and Lauren Smith 2014). This elucidated how, while the FIG was eager to raise the age of gymnasts, adult decision-makers did not truly think of the athletes in that way, pointing to deep-seated governance issues. For attitudes to change, officials themselves “must first believe that the gymnasts are truly women” (Andrea N Eagleman, Ryan M Rodenberg and Soonhwan Lee 2014, 414). Thus, while the average age of gymnasts began to increase, attitudes took longer.

Gendered media representation of the US girl-child gymnast has been well documented (Billings Andrew, Qingru Xu, James R Angelini and Paul J MacArthur 2018; Borcila 2000; Chisholm 1999, 2002). Chisholm (2002) observed how US media narratives stressed gymnasts’ childlike cuteness, focusing on their chasteness and discipline. Earlier, she noted how these narratives incorporated androgynous and dwarfed bodies in ways that suggested the transgressive and the infrahuman, while also situating female gymnasts as “unobjectionable and unthreatening figures” (Chisholm 1999, 134). Media coverage infantilised US gymnasts and subsumed them into a family sphere that “serves to limit attributions of self-determination and to create scenarios of dependency” (Chisholm 2002, 447). Similarly, Borcila’s (2000) feminist analysis of the US 1996 Olympics gymnastics coverage suggests that viewers were encouraged, as adults and citizens, to look “at ‘our’ little girls” (144). For Rachel Cohen (2013, 2) the “little girl” in gymnastics is not “simply a corollary of chronological age,” but is reflective of the childlike gymnastics body, reflecting and reinforcing a particular gymnastics femininity.

This paper focuses largely on the interplay of age and gender to draw attention to what can be considered an oft-overlooked marginalisation occurring within a sport where young girls compete at elite levels. However, in utilising contrasting constructions of Russian and American gymnasts to illustrate this, the intersection of race must be considered, as several non-white gymnasts competed for the US in the timeframe examined. Gymnastics is a sport whose white European origins have been internalised (Cervin 2021). Black US gymnasts have often been treated as exceptions to a norm created within this context. Favour was historically conferred on non-white gymnasts who embodied white ideals of finesse and elegance (ibid). US media representations of gymnastics associated girls capable of extraordinary individual achievement with whiteness (Chisholm 1999). Chisholm (199) has also noted how, when the 1996 Olympics media offered depictions of diversity, it was Asian-American gymnast Amy Chow who was depicted as an innocuous, obedient child and offered as the unproblematic face of a new, diverse America, while in 1992, Black American Olympians had not been (ibid). In 2004, all-around champion Carly Patterson was described as “all American,” while older, non-white gymnasts Annia Hatch and Mohini Bhardwaj were described via narratives of immigrant and adulthood. Black gymnasts were not always afforded cuteness or childhood like their white compatriots, similar to Sarah Projansky’s observation of black teen tennis stars (2014). It should be noted that in the analysis that follows, it was frequently a white girl-child who was constructed as the ideal.

Sport, nation, and male media perspectives

Artistic gymnastics is unique in that the women’s discipline is more popular than the men’s and dominates US Olympic coverage (Billings et al. 2014). However, coverage is frequently framed by male perspectives. For example, gymnastics commentary teams for women’s events at Olympic, World, and National championships typically feature a 2:1 male-to-female ratio, or a 1:1 male-female ratio. This echoes a sports media industry imbalance that has quantitatively and qualitatively favoured male voices (Cooky Cheryl, Michael A Messner and Michela Musto 2015). Commentators are a unique media source, who blend the “objective, judgemental and historical components” of sports coverage with dramatisation (Paul Comisky, Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillman 1977, 117). Broadcasts shape sports coverage, contribute to its “spectacle” nature, and actively recruit audiences (David Rowe 2004, 125). International events are particularly potent sites for articulations of nationalism and play a significant role in rendering the opposition as “other” (ibid, 124). Broadcasters covering these international events show a consummate awareness of what Rowe (2004) describes as their power to draw on sport’s ability to harness intense national identification that is typically only witnessed in times of war or disaster. During the Olympics, broadcasts are in a unique position in that they can do away with journalistic objectivity in favour of enthusiasm for home-nation success, mobilising nationalist sentiment in less-committed, occasional sporting audiences (Rowe 2004). The Olympics renders commentary a particular “universalist-partisan balancing act,” that draws simultaneously on both Olympic values of universal humanity and subjective support for home nations (Rowe 2004).

Meanwhile, scrutiny of coverage of women’s sports has found a history of trivialising and marginalising female athletes through infantilisation and sexualisation, including the use of sexual humour (see Bruce 2016; Cooky Cheryl, Michael A Messner and Robin H Hextrum 2013; Karen Crouse 2013). Given WAG’s status as a sport for children, this marginalisation and trivialisation occurs in context-bound ways, demonstrating how the circulation of discourses in broadcast commentary operates as part of “the overall flow of ideologies and mythologies in and out of the media sports cultural complex and the social structures, large and small, to which it is linked” (Rowe 2004, 128).

Analysing the Russian diva

In the gymnastics context, “diva” was used in two periods, between 1998 and 2004, and between 2010 and 2013, to label two Russian gymnastics stars and, at times, implicated their teammates. Language is suffused with gendered notions of power (Faye L Wachs 2006). Diva has evolved from its semantic roots to refer to a singer to become a descriptive term for a self-important person—typically a woman—who is temperamental and difficult to please. It can describe empowerment and confidence but is also deployed by mainstream media with the purpose of “demeaning and deriding successful, powerful women” (Barbara Ellen 2019). In sports, it has been used to gender-stereotype demanding and dramatic feminine behaviour in tennis (Michael Quayle, Alanna Wurm, Harley Barnes, Thomas Barr, Erin Beal, Mairead Fallon, Rachel Flynn et al. 2019). Further, the term has also frequently been employed in sports media to describe male athletes, serving as a double insult that chastises self-importance in the mythically egalitarian world of team sports by characterising it as female behaviour, becoming the off-field equivalent of “playing like a girl.” Sports language that creates and perpetuates gender stereotypes can reinforce inequality and limit possibilities for self-definition (Christy Halbert and Melissa Latimer 1994). The “Russian diva” adversary is yet another example of the trivialisation of women’s sports participation and achievements via gendered “us and them” representational strategies (Bruce 2016).

While the media construction of the US girl-child athlete has been well documented in research, the “Russian diva” has not. This study takes a qualitative, grounded theory approach, building theory from data (Juliet M Corbin and Anselm L Strauss 2008) to understand the construction of this character. It gathers perspective through both engaging with the relevant literature—particularly scholarly analyses of media depictions of US gymnasts with whom the diva was contrasted—and via qualitative observational analysis of hours of US gymnastics competition coverage, starting with the first Russian Olympic WAG team competition in 1996, to identify and examine occasions of commentators’ use of the term “diva” and its construction of Russian WAG athletes. This analysis is not intended to be quantitative or representative of all media coverage over time. Like Jessica Ritchie’s (2013) analysis of online images that construct Hillary Clinton as a “monster,” this analysis is more interested in interrogating the moments in which the diva character is constructed and reproduced in broadcasts, and how it reflected and projected discourses of ideal femininity in WAG.

The objects of the analysis are US competition broadcasts from 1996 until 2013 and obtained via personal collections and YouTube (including the USA Gymnastics archive, the Olympics channel, and gymnastics fan channels). Instances when the term “diva” was used were identified by viewing all available footage. Purpose-designed coding sheets recorded the language used, as well as elements of vision and audio, lighting, music, and diegetic and non-diegetic sound that contributed to meaning-making. From this, traits and behaviours attributed to this national stereotype were derived. Analysis shows that while some gymnasts were expressly labelled “diva,” it was inferred for others. Thus, once the traits ascribed to the diva persona were established, the footage was reviewed to include instances where gymnasts were associated with these traits.

Analysis: the Russian diva

Two Russian gymnasts were repeated labelled diva in broadcast coverage, and in specific periods of their careers: Svetlana Khorkina (1998–2004) and Aliya Mustafina (2010–2013). While both were described as immensely talented and spoken of admiringly in US gymnastics broadcasts, their competitive and side-lines behaviour was often commented upon. Khorkina won seven Olympic medals and twenty World Championship medals during a competitive career that spanned the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. She was routinely labelled a diva in international broadcasts and news media in the later, adult-aged years of her career, attracting significant attention for her artistry and flamboyant personality as well as her competitive success. Khorkina embraced the label, saying once: “[a] diva is magical. You can’t catch her. She always comes out a winner” (NBC 2004).

At the 2010 World Championships, as the Russian team re-emerged as one of the top challengers for the team gold, the team’s standout gymnast, 16-year-old Aliya Mustafina, was also labelled diva in US broadcasts. Mustafina would go on to win 19 world and Olympic medals between 2010 and 2016. Khorkina’s 2000–2004 teammates and Mustafina’s 2010–2012 teammates were also sometimes implicated in these constructions, as discussed below. Coding of the behavioural traits described in the coverage of these gymnasts showed that the Russian diva was constructed as possessing at least some of four key traits: rebelliousness, arrogance, womanliness, and emotionality. These traits are discussed below.

Rebelliousness

The diva’s purported independence and agency were sometimes constituted as rebellion. After the Soviet Union dissolved, US broadcast colour packages initially focused on gymnasts from post-Soviet states as victims of poverty, tragedies like Chernobyl or the deterioration of famed Soviet training centres. By 2000 Russia’s team performances were declining, and the national team was at times associated with a newly rebellious and independent Russian girlhood, who posed a stark contrast with their disciplined Soviet counterparts. One 2000 Olympics colour package began with a montage of ornate Moscow streetscapes set to classical music before the soundtrack shifts via a record scratch sound effect to fast-paced, 1970s surf rock, as members of the Russian WAG team talked about their stubbornness and lack of fear of their coaches (NBC 2000c). Another 2000 American Cup package depicted emerging Russian star, Yelena Produnova, speeding through US streets in a sports car, flexing her biceps and riding roller coasters to the tune of No Doubt’s 1990s feminist anthem “Just a Girl,” interspersed with shots of her coach frowning with folded arms (USA Gymnastics 2012). As Svetlana Khorkina, the original diva, aged in the sport, her independence was sometimes posed as an infectious threat to the discipline and order embodied by younger athletes. During a 1998 US colour package, one commentator described Khorkina’s presence as “dominating” the training gym, over footage of the athlete pacing pensively behind a group of younger teammates obediently lined up in front of their coaches (ABC 1998).

The diva was frequently rendered defiant of male authority, a trait portrayed largely via males in authority. Colour packages incorporated paternalistic perspectives by interspersing shots of disapproving Russian male coaches during heated interactions in training or in the background at competitions. Broadcasts also focused on the frustrations of male coaches working with “difficult” women. During her world championship debut, Aliya Mustafina appeared largely calm and self-contained, but coverage reported her male coach’s descriptions of her as “fiery,” “a difficult character,” and “a lot to handle” (NBC 2010a). This characterisation of rebelliousness was extended to the entire Russian WAG team in 2012, when commentators described training sessions as full of drama and tears, jokingly sympathising with the male coaches who worked with them (London Olympic Games Women’s Artistic Gymnastics All-around final 2012; London Olympic Games Women’s Artistic Gymnastics Qualifying Competition 2012). In contrast, the 2012 US team introduction video depicts athletes in military-like rows, listening intently to the instructions of coaches, and then celebrating a team win at the previous World Championships. In this way, media narratives equated US gymnasts’ hard work and obedience with competitive success (Eagleman, Rodenberg, and Lee 2014).

The diva became something of a cautionary tale, and her failure to submit to paternal authority was sometimes connected to competitive failure. This became the central narrative of Mustafina’s performance during the 2011 American Cup, when commentators reported that the athlete had refused her coach’s instructions to perform an easier routine and attributed her subsequent mistake and loss to this refusal (USA Gymnastics 2013b). The anecdote was also recounted in the 2012 Olympic montage introducing the Russian team, followed by a voiceover saying that Mustafina could teach the next generation of divas the difference between “stubbornness and confidence” (NBC 2012).

For Dan Dan C Hilliard (1984, 227), when sportswomen lose, they are likely to be framed as failures due to “some combination of nervousness, lack of confidence, lack of being ‘comfortable,’ lack of aggression, and lack of stamina.” The Russian diva’s loss was sometimes attributed to hubris or refusal to submit to male authority. This defiance is placed in direct contrast to the compliance of US child gymnasts, who are frequently followed by cameras as they go to their coach “fathers” for approval after a routine, inviting audiences to perceive them through the paternal gaze (Borcila 2000, 85). For Barker-Ruchti (2009, 56), this focus on athletes’ emotional responses and paternal care from male coaches enforces their status as objects of “gaze, protection and dependence.” For Chisholm (2002, 441), the frequent airing of footage of US coaches patting gymnasts on the head and uttering “good girl” constructs “propriety dynamics reminiscent not only of parenting but pet ownership.” Historically, there has also been relentless media focus on—mostly male—coaches’ assessment of US gymnasts’ performances and their sidelines coaching behaviour, emphasising gymnasts’ childlike status by framing a dependence on, and deference to, patriarchal figures. This symbolically perpetuates male authority, rendering the gymnasts the property of both audience and coach, lacking self-determination and voice.

Arrogance

The Russian diva’s confidence and competitive nature were framed as a kind of amusing arrogance, and occasionally as a lack of sportsmanship. Collectivism is heightened during Olympics coverage, a time of increased patriotic sentiment and desire to win in team competitions. Much was made of Khorkina’s passion for her country and her status as saviour and leader in the post-Soviet era. One commentator told audiences that the Russian’s “love of winning is matched by her hatred of losing” (NBC 2000a). A clip of her leading the Russian team away from the medal podium, removing the silver medal earned in the 2000 team final from her neck, was frequently recycled by broadcasters as a sign of Khorkina’s bold, passionate Russianness. At the 2000 Olympics, when cameras captured a visibly upset Khorkina speaking to her younger teammates after a series of costly mistakes during the team competition, one commentator mused over whether she was giving them a pep talk or having a “diva moment” (NBC 2000c).

In WAG, open expressions of desire for individual success are often muted compared to national team goals, and disappointment over individual loss is thus noteworthy. During the 2000 Olympic event finals, commentators noted how Khorkina did not congratulate a younger teammate who beat her to gold in the floor final (NBC 2000b). Meanwhile, US competitive behaviour, such as congratulating countrywomen even when competing against them and congratulating opponents at the end of the competition was highly routinised, suggesting an expected display of sportsmanship. During coding, it was observed that post-meet interviews with US athletes—even following individual competitions—featured standard, similarly worded platitudes about commitment to country and team, suggesting rigorous media training.

Confidence was sometimes framed as arrogance. In 2010, when the Russian team threatened to beat the US, the commentators admired Aliya Mustafina’s talent, but twice described her as behaving as if she had already won the World Championships. At the 2011 American Cup, an NBC commentator also expressed her bemusement at Mustafina’s claim that she had no idols among former Russian gymnasts (USA Gymnastics 2013b). In 2003 and 2004, Khorkina’s purported arrogance and womanliness were often treated as an amusing counter to the milk-fed, good-girl image of US gymnast Carly Patterson, her main all-around rival, who was captured smiling through her braces at the 2003 World Championships and described as having an “All-American Ivory soap face” at the 2004 Olympics (NBC 2004). In contrast, Khorkina’s confidence was attributed not just to her ability but to her desire for attention. According to a colour package broadcast during the Athens Olympics in 2004, Svetlana Khorkina walked with a “swagger” that was the result of knowing she was the centre of attention (NBC 2004). Similarly, one commentator described Khorkina’s teammate, Yelena Produnova, at the 2000 American Cup as standing out for her mix of “cockiness, strength, and femininity” (USA Gymnastics 2013a).

Womanliness

The Russian diva was sometimes portrayed as a woman among girls. Khorkina’s mature and expressive routines and direct eye contact with audiences and judges were framed as sensuous. In 1998, several commentators mentioned a topless photographic shoot Khorkina had done for Playboy magazine during competitions, and some even referred to her as a sex symbol. At the 2000 American Cup, US commentators likened 19-year-old Produnova’s relationship with her coach, Leonid Arkaev, to Rick and Lucy’s in I Love Lucy, suggesting an adult marriage dynamic rather than the father-daughter metaphors more typically used to describe coach-gymnast relationships involving girl-child athletes (USA Gymnastics 2013a). Meanwhile, Khorkina’s 2004 AA rival, Carly Patterson, was referred to as the “Texan teenager” (NBC 2004), and Mustafina’s main 2010 AA rival, Rebecca Bross, as the “kid” (NBC 2010b), which emphasised their girlhood status.

The addition of Svetlana Boginskaya who competed as a senior between 1987 and 1996, to the 2012 Olympics Russian diva montage, may be an example of “retconning,” as she was never labelled a diva during her career. Retconning is the act of imposing new information or interpretations on previously described events (It should also be noted that Boginskaya never actually competed for Russia, but for the Soviet, Unified and Belorussian teams.) Boginskaya, while emotionally restrained during competition, was frequently framed as an object of desire in the later, adult-aged stage of her career due to her physical appearance and reputation for avant-garde, sometimes sensuous choreography. Cameramen lingered on her intense stare, emphasised by black eye makeup and sober expressions. Commentators often reminded viewers that her name translates to “goddess.” In 1996, a commentator described her beauty” as being her “prowess” (NBC 1996). It should be noted that this treatment was only common in the adult years of Boginskaya and Khorkina’s careers in the nineties. Mustafina, a world champion at 16, and who competed during the 2010s, was not described in these ways. Research finds that international sports broadcasts frequently produce an “us and them” narrative whereby home-nation sportswomen are privileged with “model citizen narratives” while women from other nations are trivialised or sexualised, creating a bifurcated pattern of coverage (Bruce 2016). Chisholm (2002, 437) also noted that for US gymnasts embedded in a “cute child” narrative, there were unspoken “prohibitions against invoking—even hypothetically—heterosexual desire that might construct US female gymnasts as its object.” In the 1990s, the adult Russian diva, womanly and even seductive, was an anomaly.

Emotionality

Excessive emotionality was sometimes framed as a factor in the Russian diva’s competitive unpredictability. Her mercurial behaviour was also connected to the Russians’ heightened artistry, a product of rigorous ballet training and focus on choreography and performance. “There is nothing a diva likes but to put on a show,” one commentator said as the Russians began their floor exercises in 2012 (NBC 2012). Many Russian gymnasts were praised for retaining artistry and showmanship in a period where, as Barker-Ruchti (2009) notes, emotional expression and grace had been replaced with “composure, automation and precision” in gymnastics’ artistic ideology of the 70s (54).

Svetlana Khorkina’s emotional behaviour caused much comment throughout her career. Broadcasts frequently captured her scowling as she paced the sidelines, kissing the uneven bars after a successful performance, or blowing kisses to the audience. One broadcast described her as “[a] woman of many faces, pensive one moment, wildly expressive the next” (ABC 1998). This connection between emotionality and artistry created a flighty, feminine, artistic persona. As Aliya Mustafina began her floor routine at the 2012 Olympics qualification, one commentator told audiences it would be “a piece of work in every sense of the word” (NBC 2012). In 2012, over shots of rising Russian star Viktoria Komova in training, commentators told viewers that, from the footage they’ve seen from inside the Russian training centre, there had been no shortage of tears and “diva moments” (NBC 2012). After the 2012 “diva” colour package introducing the Russian team ended with shots of tears and emotions in the training gym, a commentator immediately quipped “showtime!” as the Russian team marched onto the competition floor, framing the Russian WAG athletes’ mercurial behaviour as entertainment (NBC, 2012).

Connections were also drawn between artistry, emotionality, and lack of consistency, painting the diva as brilliant yet prey to mental weakness. When asked who would win the 2012 Olympic team medal between the US and Russia, one US commentator ruled the Russians out because, despite being “beautiful,” they could be “flaky” and “flighty” and lacked the Americans’ composure (NBC 2012). At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, a fall in Khorkina’s strongest event cost gold in the AA competition. This was attributed to her inability to recover emotionally after a technical issue had earlier caused a fall on the vault. At the next Olympics, many broadcasters focused on whether she’d be able to move beyond this past competitive trauma to win.

While the construction of female athletes as tearful or emotionally fragile is not uncommon (see Quayle et al. 2019; John Vincent 2004; Adrian Yip 2018), here it was used to delineate differences not between genders but between national sporting femininities. According to Barker-Ruchti (2009), when the girl-child gymnast became the dominant gymnastics figure in the 1970s, it was the behaviour of 14-year-old Nadia Comaneci—who possessed a smile that appeared “automated” on the floor and appeared “focused and solemn” off the floor (52)—that would become the contemporary norm for sidelines behaviour. Andrew C Billings and Susan Tyler Eastman (2003) found that US athletes overall were likely to be described as more composed and courageous than athletes of other nationalities in sports coverage. For Chisholm (2002, 27), female US gymnasts were frequently singled out as displaying “extraordinary manifestations of disciplined subjectivity.” Positioned in relation to codes of “paternalistic national culture,” the US WAG gymnast must maintain exceptional “physical and emotional control” (Chisholm 2002, 447) to achieve and maintain her status as a heroic and exemplary citizen. Meanwhile, commentary that, at times, equated the Russian diva’s emotionality with competitive ability played on gendered stereotypes that associated them with mental weakness, and inconsistency.

Conclusion

The Russian diva character occupied a short, historic chapter in US television coverage of gymnastics, bookended by two major historical moments for the sport: the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and claims of toxicity and abuse in elite gymnastics that emerged around the world in the 2010s. Over this period, we also saw the continuing rise in the average age of WAG elite gymnasts. At the times of its use, the term diva operated as a tongue-in-cheek label for a set of behaviours, and, at times, as a cautionary tale. While she exemplified qualities that, in other contexts, might be celebrated as post-feminist attributes, her competitive behaviour was rendered as an amusing and rebellious exception to WAG’s feminine norms in the unique gendered context of the sport. This constitution of the diva as a counter to idealised girl-child femininity highlights a significant and relatively unexamined space in our conceptualisation of the intersection of age and gender in representations of women in sports. From this, and from the context in which these narratives took place, I draw the following conclusions.

First, the early use of the Russian diva stereotype was partly a product and legacy of US sports coverage in periods of heightened patriotism inflected by USSR/USA relations. As Chisholm (1999) argues, media celebration of US defeats of the Russians is best understood in the context of a sport dominated by the communist bloc for a significant period and popularised in the US at the peak of the Cold War (128). Here, the legacy of the Cold War is perpetuated by focusing on the symbolic defeat of the Soviet system beyond its actual existence (Chisholm 1999). In sports broadcasts, national stereotypes are frequently employed to form symbolic boundaries around a nation-state (Michael Billig 1995) and to determine a patriot subject position while creating an “other” that is different and thus interesting (Desmarais and Bruce 2008). The villain stereotype has dominated Hollywood depictions of Soviets and Russians (Tom Brook 2014). Meanwhile, the media routinely depicts Russian women as spies, prostitutes, or mail-order brides, constructing them as “passive commodities” and “morally suspect outsiders” (Elena Maydell 2017, 345). The Russian diva character carries overtures of this suspect outsider, albeit in ways specific to gymnastics. She was not precisely a villain or an antagonist—a difficult character to produce in an individual sport—but, at times, a foil to herself. She was also a departure from the Soviet gymnast, idolized by US gymnastics fans (see Cervin 2021), and who had embodied recent notions of idealised gymnastics girlhood.

Second, in creating and critiquing the diva as a form of national stereotype, commentators articulated an ideal WAG femininity through repeated construction and contrast. At any time, multiple femininities and masculinities operate in a hierarchy of socially constructed power relations (Raewyn Connell 2005). The diva character signalled a flicker of gender anxiety within artistic gymnastics. She threatened both the stable girlhood symbolic order that had reigned since the 1970s—despite the steady rise in the average ages of gymnasts—and a patriarchal order symbolised by male coaching authority and the male gaze that frequently frames women’s gymnastics coverage. This threat was, at times, corrected and policed via constitution of the diva. While her skills were admired, losses were at times attributed to rebelliousness and a refusal to defer to paternal control. Meanwhile, lack of emotional control was sometimes equated with a lack of competitive fortitude, perpetuating narratives that equate femininity with mental weakness. Conversely, the childlike US gymnasts’ cuteness and presumed lack of social subjectivity offered “compelling proof of unthreatening, indeed pleasurable, assimilability” (Chisholm 2002, 431). In framing these dual and duelling femininities, commentators reinforced the cultural norms of a sport in which behaviours and physical attributes associated with “little girls” formed the ideal. Meanwhile, the persistent framing of the diva through predominantly male perspectives of commentators and coaches is yet another example of paternalistic depictions that Borcila (2000) offers as evidence of A. E Kavanagh’s (1993, 133) argument that an emphasis on connections between male coaches and female athletes locates “athletic prowess outside of women’s bodies.”

Third, an intersectional approach that accounts for the experience of the girl-child athlete is vital in understanding the forms of marginalisation at play in sports like gymnastics. While feminist sports scholarship has drawn significant attention to the ways female athletes are marginalised based not only on gender but also race, class, and ethnicity, we cannot overlook age. Because, as Taefi (2009) has reminded us, ignoring how gender or adult dominance might subordinate girls can allow an entire category of oppression to evade analysis or critique. Child and adolescent girls’ views and interests are routinely accorded little social or political weight and children’s credibility is often doubted (Michael D Baumtrog and Harmony Peach 2019). The most damaging result is that girls are less able to voice concerns or draw attention to infringements of their rights (Taefi 2009). This has become evident in WAG over the last decade. The dangers of narratives that marginalise and police feminine autonomy and idealise submission to paternal authority are evident when considered in the context of recent widespread allegations of oppression in WAG. The high-profile Larry Nassar case also revealed the extent of sporting bodies’ mishandling of sexual abuse in elite gymnastics and opened doors for many gymnasts worldwide to feel more confident to speak out about elite training environments that exposed them to extreme authority, emotional manipulation, and body shaming. As a result, elite coaches in several nations have been stood down, investigated, or subject to media scrutiny for contributing to abusive training environments. Former US gymnasts who had previously made allegations of abuse and authoritarian coaching have said their past claims have only now been taken seriously (Jasmine Garsd 2018).

In this analysis, we see how seemingly innocuous media narratives offer potent examples of how the combined effects of gender bias and paternalism can be synthesised to “intensify girl marginalisation” (Taefi 2009, 345), even in smaller, unintended ways.

The intersection of age and gender is a vital consideration, and feminist sports research must attend to this gap, particularly in sports like gymnastics, ice skating and, more recently, skateboarding, where girls compete at elite levels. It should be noted however, that in drawing out the overlooked and vital intersection of age and gender in sports like gymnastics, this paper has been limited in scope, leaving little room for full consideration of the complex, cumulative effects of race, gender and age—particularly concerning US gymnasts. More recently, racialized news media discourse and online abuse experienced by Black gymnasts such as 2012 Olympic AA champion Gabby Douglas and 2016 Olympic AA champion Simone Biles, which has, at times, rendered them as disobedient or recalcitrant, highlights the need to examine the representation of US gymnasts across a range of media platforms and over a broader timeframe than examined in this paper.

After the 2012 Olympics, the “diva” label had largely disappeared from US commentary. This may be attributed to various factors. After the 2012 Olympics, articles appeared in feminist pop culture pieces criticising the use of the “diva” stereotype. Successful adult elite gymnasts—some in their twenties and even thirties—became increasingly common in the sport. Meanwhile, sports commentary has become more measured in its treatment of female athletes due to changing feminist attitudes. However, this analysis reminds us of the continuing need for serious scrutiny of even seemingly trivial ways in which female athletes can be marginalised in sports media. It also demonstrates the need for an intersectional lens to consider the overlooked interplay of gender, race, ethnicity, and age in sports where girl-child athletes train and compete in elite-level sports.

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Notes on contributors

Brigid McCarthy

Brigid McCarthy is a lecturer in Journalism in the Bachelor of Media and Communication at La Trobe University. Her research interests are feminist sports media studies, particularly the representation of gender and girlhood in sport media, online sports fandoms and sport social media.