Soft Activism in Sport: Semantic and Sentiment Analysis of Well-Being Narratives Across Elite Multi-Sport Athletes

Abstract

Elite athletes increasingly act as influential communicators, shaping public conversations on mental health and well-being. By sharing personal struggles, emotional challenges, and recovery experiences, they engage in soft forms of advocacy, humanizing issues, and reducing stigma. This research fills a gap in athlete communication by providing a multi-sport, multi-country, athlete-centered analysis of well-being narratives, focusing on athletes’ own online communications rather than solely on media framing as in previous studies. It advances the field methodologically through the combined use of semantic mapping and sentiment analysis, enabling a gender-comparative, data-driven examination of both thematic framing and emotional tone of these narratives. Namely, this study analyzes verbatim quotes from ten elite European athletes across diverse sports, including tennis, swimming, basketball, football, motorcycling, gymnastics, and weightlifting. Using semantic mapping and sentence-level sentiment analysis, it examines how athletes frame well-being experiences and how narrative tone, and emotional progression differ by gender. Findings reveal gendered patterns: female athletes adopt reflective, resilience-oriented narratives, progressing toward emotional closure, while male athletes display volatile sentiment trajectories, emphasizing performance restoration and control. These insights demonstrate that athlete narratives serve as soft activism, bridging personal experience and gendered expression, with implications for sports organizations, media framing, and health communication strategies.