Abstract
Blood on the ice. Cheers when the injured athlete stands and limps off the field. Comebacks, backflips, and back injuries. Celebrity athletes are punished and rewarded for their abilities, including their ability to perform while injured or work through pain. Injuries, illness, disablement, and even death are not uncommon in celebrity culture broadly and the field of competitive sports more specifically. While critical disability studies often attends to disabled celebrities, less research and critical attention has been paid to the disablement of celebrity and the expectation and performance of injury or illness understood through the lens of ablenationalism. Focusing on international figure skating and the 2022 Winter Olympics, this paper offers a supercripping of athletic celebrity by interrogating how gender, race, age, and nationality impact a global audience’s view of vulnerability, risk, and harm. Analyzing media coverage of the event alongside popular discourse uncovers the impact of nationalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy on sports narratives and celebrity cultures of debilitation and disablement.
Cripping celebrity
In the morning practice before the free skate for the 2022 Olympics, world famous Japanese figure skater Hanyu Yuzuru 1 sprained an ankle that had suffered multiple sprains over the course of his decade-plus career. Despite the swelling and severe pain, Hanyu decided to skate. He injected a painkiller into his ankle and performed an incredibly challenging 4-minute performance, including quad jumps and the first certified (but unsuccessful) quad axel. Fans flocked to Twitter to share their support of Hanyu, celebrating his achievement, grace, strength, and beauty, and the hashtags #YuzaruHanyu #HanyuYuzaru and #YuzuruHanyu 2 exploded. “Fourth in Beijing, First in Fans Hearts” announced the Wall Street Journal (Hua and Lin, 2022), as Hanyu’s injured skate and attempted 4A took over the Internet and was repeated across multiple media platforms.
Blood on the ice. Cheers when the injured athlete stands and limps off the field. Comebacks, backflips, and back injuries. Celebrity athletes are punished and rewarded for their abilities, including their ability to perform while injured or work through pain. Injuries, illness, disablement, and even death are not uncommon in celebrity culture broadly and the field of competitive sports more specifically. While the field of critical disability studies often attends to disabled celebrities, less research and critical attention has been paid to the disablement of celebrity and the expectation and performance of injury or illness understood through the lens of nationalist sacrifice and gratefulness.
Working across the intersection of media studies and critical disability studies, this paper offers a reframing of the theoretical figure of the “supercrip,” and performs a qualitative analysis of media coverage of the 2022 Winter Olympics figure skating competition. A sample set of articles have been selected for analysis from a range of large English-speaking digital media outlets with an emphasis on Canadian and American publications. Media outlets that appear in the sample set include The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, CBC, NPR, The Toronto Star, ESPN, Slate, and Vox. This sample represents the news cycle that I experienced as a Canadian viewer and media consumer during the competition. Complementing the discourse analysis of media reporting, I also rely on anecdotal evidence from my experience as a figure skating fan who was on figure skating discussion boards, fan boards, and social media sites (Twitter, Reddit) during the Olympics, and who watched the live or recorded coverage of these events. A quantitative study was beyond the scope of this project, and further investigation should be made into the media reporting of figure skating, with attention to disability, injury, risk, harm, and vulnerability.
While the focus of this article is on competitive figure skating, this study is relevant to the field of celebrity studies more broadly and the topic of celebrity debilitation has been raised in popular discourse. Consider, for example, Indian singer KK, who collapsed on-stage during a performance in Kolkata in May 2022 and died of cardiac arrest, or that international K-pop phenomenon BTS frequently require the use of respirators following a performance. Bodyminds are routinely pushed to their limits in the performance of celebrity, and this suffering and harm is either erased/disappeared in pop culture or interpreted/read as an act of fan service – such as the conclusion to the 2022 Elvis biopic (what really killed him? “His love for you” explains Tom Hanks). Examining the media reporting of figure skating in the 2022 Winter Olympics, I look at how the sport and the expectations of celebrity, framed through nationalist discourse and under a global capitalist system, incentivizes success, overcoming, and ability, and how athletic disablement intersects with race, age, gender, and nationality in media reporting and popular opinion.
Disability, impairment, supercrip
Critical disability studies largely emerged from critiques of the biomedical industry’s pathologization of bodily difference and chronic illness, the aptly named “medical model” of disability. Instead, disability scholars distinguish between a biological “impairment” and a socially constructed “disability” (Couser, 2009; Wendall, 1996). However, a growing trend in disability scholarship is to put pressure on the way in which the social model – which argues that society creates disability by failing to provide adequate access – is complicit in the continued marginalization of bodily difference through its reproduction of neoliberal values; Kafer (2013) argues that “both impairment and disability are social” (p. 7). In this paper, I do not differentiate between disability and impairment, understanding both as a result of the establishment of hegemonic bodily norms, neoliberal labor expectations, and unjust and violent systems of power and control. On a personal note, I identify as disabled, and do not use the term “impaired” to refer to my bodily experiences or access needs. However, this is an ongoing debate within the field, and other scholars – and disabled people – may feel or identify differently.
While my theoretical background lies in critical disability studies, my current research is deeply invested in “disability justice,” a contemporary movement and theoretical tradition that understands the liberation of disabled bodies as intimately tied to the liberation of intersecting identity positions. Disability justice calls for the dismantling of settler colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, and the cisheteropatriarchy, and seeks to reorient society around interdependence and collective care (Mingus, 2011; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). By following the relationship between athletic disablement and nationalism, with attention to gender, race, and age, my paper forwards a disability justice-oriented call for a more ethical and just society.
“Crip” is a term in disability activism and scholarship that emerges as a reclaiming of “cripple.” “Supercrips” are stereotypes or fictional characters who overcome the limitations of their disabilities to (1) achieve normate bodies and abilities, or (2) surpass the abilities of the normate body. Supercrips serve predominantly as motivational tools for able-bodied society (what has also be termed “inspiration porn”) and are typically understood as anathema to disability activism and societal transformation. World-class athletes frequently appear in crip theory as examples of supercrips. Prosthetic-using Olympians Aimee Mullins and Oscar Pistorius often appear as examples of the fetishization of hyperability, athleticism, and overcoming narratives, how technology in the popular and cultural imagination is used to eradicate disability, and how cyborg discourse gets leveraged in service to “ablenationalism,” the conflation of ableism and nationalism (Mitchell and Snyder, 2015). However, Schalk (2016) critiques the use of the term supercrip, noting that “calling a representation a supercrip narrative, it seems, is. . .the ultimate scholarly insult that dismisses the possibility of finding recuperative, liberatory, or positive aspects of a representation” (p. 71).
My goal in this article is to introduce additional nuance into the discussion of athletes as ablenationalist figures and supercrips by recognizing the temporality of hyperability and the impact of athleticism on the bodyminds of athletes. In this work I center the lived, embodied realities of athletes who sustain multiple (and often chronic or permanent) injuries throughout their careers and investigate the way athletes are leveraged by the state in ablenationalist discourse in curated and short-lived moments. Focusing on international figure skating, this paper offers a supercripping of athletic celebrity by interrogating how gender, race, age, and nationality impact a global audience’s perception of vulnerability, risk, and harm. I also make visible the cost of overcoming pain and injury and suggest that we expand the term “supercrip” to include not only the figure of the disabled body who overcame their disability, but bodies that were considered “super” and become disabled as a result of this hyper athleticism. This expanded definition of supercrip makes space for the politics of disablement in sporting communities and makes visible the harm that nationalism incurs on its symbols and icons. This reframing of “supercrip” makes room for the process of disablement in celebrity culture and fields that demand hyperathleticism and ability, thereby reclaiming disabled and debilitated athletes as crip kin.
The American dream: ice edition
Nationalism and nation-building have a long relationship with organized sporting events as well as the media reporting of athletes and competitions. In their 2021 study, Knoester and Davis (2022) found that American institutionalized sports foster nationalism, militarism, and patriotism. The Olympics is a particularly visible practice of nation-building: flags are waved, anthems are sung, national celebrities perform on million-dollar stages, genocides are covered up, and colonizers either brag about occupying land or having reconciled with Indigenous peoples. Of course, there are always resistances on the ground – protests in the hosting country, for example, as well as individuals who refuse to engage with apartheid states (i.e., Algeria has a policy of refusing to engage with Israeli athletes as a show of solidarity with Palestine). However, the dominant message worldwide (and it is broadcast crisply and clearly around the world) is of cooperation and competition, firmly re-etching the fictional “imagined community” (Anderson, 2006) of nations and reinforcing national identity along the lines of hyperability and athleticism. In fact, a 2013 study of Olympic media viewing following the 2012 games noted that “Olympic viewing resulted in significantly higher scores for patriotism, nationalism, and smugness, but not Internationalism” (Billings et al., 2013). Just as the games themselves reinforce national boundaries and nationalist identities, media consumption of the Olympics produces nationalist beliefs among viewers.
As a predominantly individual event with little to no recognition at a regional level, figure skating may appear different from team sports that routinely gather local, regional, and national followings (i.e., American football, Canadian hockey, European football). Indeed, while it’s not difficult to identify nationalist discourse and sentiment around events like the FIFA World Cup, figure skating crosses borders in distinct ways – from pairs skaters who come from different home countries (eligible to compete in all competitions outside of the Olympics) to the popularity of certain skaters, like Hanyu Yuzuru, who has a massive fanbase in China despite the tensions between China and Japan. However, when it comes to international and national competitions, and most notably the Olympics, figure skating gets leveraged by state media in ways that reinforce hegemonic nationalism. In fact, figure skating is one of the most highly watched events in the Olympics, and figure skaters are more likely to obtain corporate sponsorship than other athletes. A 2022 Google Trends analysis positioned figure skating as the most searched event during the Winter Olympics (Sauer, 2022). It’s also worth recognizing that figure skating is not distinct from other sporting events in its emphasis on hyperathleticism, ability, strength, and competition – and, as an individual sport, highly emphasizes the myth of meritocracy and the ideology of individualism that are prevalent in the Global South/West/North America.
Athletes – and athletes-turned-celebrities, if they win enough gold medals or are pretty enough to be featured on a billboard – become heralded as symbols of the state, nationalist icons, and exemplary bodies: physically and mentally superior due to their strength, speed, dedication, and individual hard work. When American skater Nathan Chen “the quad king” won gold in 2022, many articles suggested that the reason he hadn’t landed a medal in 2018 was because of anxiety, crafting a narrative of mental growth and strength. He “showed no signs of residual nerve or fear” reported ESPN (Maine, 2022), while The New York Time wrote that “he stayed off social media, played his electric guitar, and texted and talked with his family every day, feeling bolstered by their resounding, soothing pep talks” (Macur, 2022a). According to NPR, he “overcame those demons” (Diaz, 2022) to win. Physical ability and success became translated into mental health and success, and here Chen is framed as having conquered both.
The media reporting of Chen’s gold medal win also spun a rags to riches/underdog story of a kid whose family slept in the car when they went to competitions since they couldn’t afford a hotel (Macur, 2022a), playing up the narrative of the self-made man, implying that hard work does pay of, that the USA is a meritocracy, and that upward mobility still exists. In reality, the financial difficulties that Chen’s family faced is not uncommon in figure skating, one of the most expensive sports to participate in, since it includes travel costs, booking private ice time, paying coaches, and buying costumes. Other stories highlighted that his parents were immigrants from China, positioning the USA as the place where dreams come true, and subtly implying that the USA is welcoming and open to migrants (McCarthy, 2022). The positioning of Chen’s family as hard-working and self-sacrificing plays into the “model minority” stereotype often ascribed to Asian Americans. This media portrayal of Chen supports Oh’s (2019) claim that “sports celebrities are not free from racialized and gendered postcolonial ideology” (715). This “redemption story” (Diaz, 2022) was repeated in different news outlets, each celebrating how Chen had overcome mental and physical limitations alongside external barriers to become the best.
Ultimately, these news articles reinforce a nationalist agenda that celebrates Chen as American and celebrates the USA as having created Chen (and is thus superior to all other countries who did not win gold). It’s interesting to note how Chen becomes leveraged as an ideal citizen and an ideal immigrant (although he was born in the US and is second-generation, technically not an immigrant) because of his individual success and athletic prowess. We can speculate that American media would not have been so quick to claim him and his family if he had not obtained success on a visible international stage; we can also identify the way race, ethnicity, and nationality play into discourses of exceptionalism and athleticism in Olympics media coverage.
Russian panic: vulnerable white girls
While the USA was venerating Chen’s gold medal, a scandal was unfolding across the international figure skating community, revolving around a 15-year-old Russian women’s skater who had failed a drug test prior to the Olympic competition. Competing discourses of age, gender, and health exploded on the Twittersphere and in mainstream media, and the scandal ultimately prompted the International Skating Union (ISU) to raise the age of women’s senior figure skating from 15 to 17. Many people – including retired skaters and announcers – were upset that the skater wasn’t disqualified from the entire competition, focusing on fairness and cheating. Other news articles focused on her age and gender as signs of vulnerability and criticized officials for not protecting the child from both the media spotlight and a potentially abusive coach who may have forced her to take drugs (Abad-Santos, 2022; Dunbar, 2022). A heavy anti-Russian thread ran through the discourse, with claims that Russians always dope and cheat in competitions (Dunbar and Ellingworth, 2022; Mann, 2022). Further exposés described the brutal training conditions that young girls are subjected to in Russian figure skating, including public weigh-ins, restricted diets, emotional abuse, and being forced to practice while injured (Abad-Santos, 2022; Wang, 2022). One might consider the scandal as much a form of sports entertainment and a practice of athletic nationalism as the skating programs themselves.
Of note, very little conversation extended beyond the borders of Russia: the abuse and disablement of girls in the sport was solely understood as a Russian problem – despite the fact that the ISU itself awarded her coach Eteri Tutberidze “Coach of Year” in 2020, and despite a similar 2016 exposé revealing the rampant abuse and disablement of girls in gymnastics in the USA. There are many similarities between the two scandals and how they were reported by the media: both focused on abusive coaches, rather than an abusive system; both involved many girls and women under the age of 20; many of the athletes were encouraged to develop disordered eating; many suffered injuries in the sport or were encouraged to compete while injured; and many athletes consequently retired or were forced to retire early. Yet when I think of Kerri Strug forced by her coach to vault with torn ligaments and a sprained ankle in the 1996 Olympics, I don’t immediately connect her to young feminine Russian skaters: instead, I think of Hanyu, attempting a quad axel on a severely sprained ankle.
This media and fan response emerges from the intersection of race, age, and gender, and is deeply shaped by global systems of patriarchy and white supremacy. As I and other scholars have noted in previous work, white girls are often represented in the media as the most vulnerable population and the most worthy of protection, an inheritor of the Victorian era framing of white femininity as the embodiment of fragility, innocence, and purity (Ahmed, 2010; Jerreat-Poole, 2020; Lury, 2010; Schlesselman-Tarango, 2017). While white girls are often perceived as being more vulnerable than other demographics, in reality, this is a deliberate myth of the white supremist patriarchy that serves two functions: (1) to justify the actual harm done to bodies of color and (2) to reinforce the weakness and incompetence of femininity. Indeed, ESPN described the skater as a “high schooler with fuzzy pink skate guards and her beloved Pomeranian puppy back home,” using signals of traditional girlhood and cuteness (pink and puppies) (ESPN and ABC Staff, 2022), The New York Times noted that she was “clutching her trusty worn stuffed toy rabbit” (Macur, 2022b), and The Toronto Star described her as “an ethereal girl made flesh” (Arthur, 2022), drawing associations between white femininity and frailty, thinness, and otherworldliness.
The use of the term “girl” in this discussion is deliberate and carries cultural weight; children are typically understood as more vulnerable and more dependent on the adults around them. Describing the Russian skaters as “girls” reinforces their position of vulnerability in relation to their coaches and other adults in the sport. It’s worth noting that in men’s figure skating, teenage skaters are not typically referred to as “boys” in the media or in fan discussions online. While the disablement of skaters like Hanyu is read as a noble self-sacrifice or overcoming narrative (he achieved a certified 4A despite injury, understood as an incredible accomplishment), or erased entirely, the disablement of white girls/young women in the sport invokes a moral panic. What we can learn from this analysis of media representation of risk, vulnerability, and harm in figure skating is that some suffering is accepted and considered noble, even, perhaps, understood as a sacrifice for the fans and the nation, while other suffering is understood as unacceptable, particularly when bodies are perceived as vulnerable, or when the violence is committed by or within a rival or enemy nation.
Cultures of debilitation
Hanyu is not the only figure skater to perform with an injury or to suffer injuries in the sport. Chen, age 22 at the time of the 2022 Olympics, lives with chronic pain due a hip injury he suffered in 2016. Ashley Cain, age 26, has suffered multiple concussions over her career. As I was writing this paper in the fall of 2022, current Olympic silver medalist, Japanese slater Kagiyama Yuma, age 18 during the Olympics, dropped out of the 2022–2023 Grand Prix season due to stress fractures. The short career-span of several Russian women in figure skating has largely been due to severe injuries these teenagers sustain during their programs, alongside other health concerns specific to figure skating, such as eating disorders. Thinner athletes, after all, can rotate better and are thus more likely to land quad jumps, pushing skaters to be as thin as possible. While fans mourn and hand-wring over figure skaters who retire at age 18, 19, or 20, Hanyu, at 27, is considered to have had a long career. Injuries are par for the course for a figure skater: they often cycle through periods of injury and rehabilitation and have close relationships with the biomedical industry through physiotherapy, surgery, and medication.
Former Canadian Paralympian Howe’s (2004) research on professional sports is “concerned with issues of pain, injury and risk, but, importantly, it focuses upon how this triplex is transformed in the sporting world, which at the elite level has become increasingly commercialized” (3). In his investigation of cultures of risk, framed around Beck’s (1992) Risk Society and Grayson’s (1999) work on harm in Ethics, Injuries and the Law in Sports Medicine, Howe notes that “the structure of sporting culture. . .is constructed to sideline or eliminate discussions of the issues surrounding pain and injury” (4). As I’ve attempted to illustrate in this article, when harm maps onto culturally perceived risk, as in the case of young white women, discussions occur and change is possible; however, when harm does not map onto perceived risk, injuries are instead rendered hypervisible as signals of hypermasculinity and nationalist sacrifice, while the actual pain and implications of long-term debilitation are erased and ignored. Race, gender, and age intersect with cultural narratives about risk, and these dialogs and perceptions have real-world implications on how society and governing bodies respond to injury. Furthermore, I want to suggest that the state and state media deliberately employ overcoming narratives as ablenationalist propaganda and in fact rely on the process of disablement in order to cultivate narratives of individual exceptionalism. Injury and debilitation are not extraneous to commercialized sports, sports media, or cultural narratives of athleticism, ability, and nationalism, but central to them.
Chen is one in a long line of celebrated athletes who rise to fame for a short while before disappearing, replaced by the next superstar. These larger-than-life figures are, of course, an ablenationalist myth. Once an athlete retires or falls from the public spotlight, major media outlets stop reporting on them. If they did, we would recognize not only how short-lived their hyper-able-bodiedness was, but also the disablement caused by athleticism. Mainstream reporting also rarely interrogates the cycle of health and illness, ability and disability, that is experienced by athletes and resonates with those of us who live with chronic illness or chronic pain. Athletes routinely go through cycles of injury and rehabilitation before appearing, shining and apparently healthy, on the ice. For those few minutes, they seem invincible. Then the song ends, and they limp offstage. Except, of course, for those times we witness on camera a bad fall, and a bleeding or broken athlete being carried off the ice: the process of debilitation captured in real time and broadcast around the world. Still, media and fan discourse are frequently quick to rewrite these injuries as part of an overcoming narrative, so when (if) the athlete does return to the ice, we’ll cheer twice as loud, because we know they worked hard to overcome their disability to risk their bodies once again for our entertainment.
While the static snapshot of an athlete at their best is used as ablenationalist propaganda, we can and should recover the body behind the spectacle as one living with chronic pain, disability, illness, and/or mental illness. Celebrity athletic figureheads are treated as replaceable images, bodies to be used and discarded, processed through the media-nationalist-industrial complex as flag-wearing icons of exceptionalism. I want to invite scholars to wrestle with the temporality of “supercrip” and to attend to the real versus perceived risk, vulnerability, and harm among athletes, celebrities, and other bodies that have been leveraged by state media as national symbols, icons, or heroes. I want us to investigate and ultimately dismantle the harmful processes embedded in celebrity culture, particularly within capitalist, colonial societies in which individual bodies are treated as disposable. Finally, as a sports fan, I want the world of figure skating to grapple with its culture of debilitation and abuse and turn toward an ethics of care.
