The Olympics, nationalism, and multiculturalism: News coverage of naturalized players in the Korean men’s national ice hockey team

Abstract

The naturalization of athletes for the purpose of participating in the Olympics is a noticeable feature of today's superdiverse sporting contexts. Focusing on the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games, in this paper, I explore how North American-born male ice hockey players who have become naturalized into South Korea are reproduced in media coverage of Canada and South Korea. Applying insights from critical discourse studies, transnationalism, and critical multiculturalism, I specifically examine how each country re/forms its own imagined community through these transnational sporting migrants and the ways that concepts of immigration, citizenship, whiteness, masculinity, and multiculturalism are linked, fused, and/or conflicted within it. Analysis suggests that in both countries, the hockey migrants have been illuminated as new national symbols enhancing the multicultural national brand of each country, whether as immigrants or emigrants, solidifying in the process the hegemonic position of whiteness as a global phenomenon beyond the West.