Reading Le Jingyi’s Back: The Creation and Construction of the Sino-Steroid Spectre in the Western Media in the Post–Cold War Era

Abstract

This paper tells the story of Le Jingyi, a former World Championship Chinese swimmer, describing how the Western media portrayed, represented, and discursively deconstructed her image, especially her physique, to create the spectral and hyper-masculinised image known as the ‘Sino-steroid spectre’. Although Le never tested positive for drug usage, the Western media demonised her, depicting her as the definitive symbol of a doped female athlete, using such derogatory terms as ‘Chinese drug machine’, the ‘spectre of the monster’, the ‘most muscular of swimmers’, the ‘human harpoon’, a ‘walking hypodermic needle’, and so on. Le’s domination in women’s swimming awakened the fears Western media once reserved for the East German swimmers. This study investigated how the paranoid steroid phobia fed the West’s self-image as pure, superior, and entitled. Within this political culture, steroids became a pivotal rhetorical resource in the Western quest for purity in the modern history of sports. This study’s significance lies in its analysis of how the Western media’s obsession with one athlete’s deviation from their stereotypical image of the ideal Chinese woman revealed more about their own misogyny and xenophobia than about Le’s ability.