Pixies in a windstorm: Tracing Australian gymnasts’ stories of athlete maltreatment through media data

Abstract

ABSTRACT The media have reported stories of a toxic sport culture in elite gymnastics. Our interdisciplinary research team, through the lens of cultural relativism, sought to present athlete maltreatment as culturally constructed across individual, organizational and national cultural layers in Olympic development contexts. Tracing storied media data from elite Australian gymnasts, we tailored our sociocultural interpretation of athlete maltreatment within an Asia-Pacific context. We engaged in a reflexive thematic analysis to analyze and recognize our interpretations of the media data. We use a polyphonic vignette to highlight multiple storylines of Olympic athlete maltreatment across five temporal phases: (1) defining an Australian gymnast, (2) grooming an Australian gymnast, (3) living as an Australian gymnast, (4) questioning gymnastics and (5) what happens to Australian gymnasts now? Utilizing Asia-Pacific media data facilitated our nuanced interpretation of infacing and outfacing athlete maltreatment as media sources project athlete narratives in alignment with cultural agendas.