The Greatest: Mythmaking in Sports
Sports are all about spectacle. Some may disagree, seeing it as a threat to the purity of the game, but the optics speak for themselves; social media and viral marketing have exacerbated this effect and characterized it as solely contemporary, but major sporting events become fixtures of the cultural zeitgeist through the inherent, irresistible pathos of sport. From the Olympics to the World Cup, we gather to gawk at the athlete –counting the sweat drops on their brow, tracing their steps, savoring their victories as our own.
If the sport is the spectacle, the athlete is the star keeping the lights on. Regardless of one’s personal investment in sports outside of such calendar fixtures, their universal appeal is undeniable. For the uninitiated, there may be nothing particularly awe-inducing about twenty-ish adults engaged in what looks to be a child’s game. What gets hearts beating and jerseys off shelves are the athletes who audiences develop bonds with: the rags-to-riches underdog, the cold-blooded prodigy, and the bleeding sob story, all on the biggest stages in the televised world; myths developing in real time, tangible even through barriers of screens and privilege, implicating audiences as participants themselves.
Athletes and the Narrative
The little boy from Rosario, Santa Fe, has just pitched up in heaven. He climbs into a galaxy of his own. He has his crowning moment and, of course, he is not alone. He was beautiful. He was the point of difference. He has always been the point of difference. Unparalleled. (...) But as he falls in love with the object in the world that his heart most desired, it is hard to escape the supposition that he has rendered himself today– the greatest of all time.
- Peter Drury
The prior documentary was proclaimed just seconds after the final match of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, a hard-fought three hour long game between sport titans Argentina and France, broadcasted to over 1.5 billion people in what would be considered one of the greatest matches in the history of the sport. As Peter Drury professed, Lionel Messi had successfully captained his nation to their third overall World Cup trophy and their first in thirty-six years. When the Argentine grazed his lips over the golden trophy in one cold, fairytale kiss, his fate had officially been sealed.
Drury’s prose acted as an ornate flourish for the match’s English broadcast, intuitively demonstrating the power of storytelling in sport. While Messi’s biography just so happens to lend itself to the romanticism and grandiosity of folklore, we owe much of our personal investment on athletes to those who tell their stories: commentators, journalists, and now more prevalently than ever, marketers.
In the case of Messi, his backstory checks all the boxes for a compelling underdog story– the spotty yet prodigious childhood he rose from, the immediate success abroad at a still tender age, the black-and-blue lows and glittering highs of his international career, the mounting accolades of all shapes and sizes. It seems straight out of fiction, like a screenplay bursting with vague plot points on ambition and humility while really being just Oscar-bait. But this has all been carefully documented, with journalists curating each new, unfolding facet of the athlete into an engaging chapter for a story that’s still being written. None of it is necessarily untrue– with selective language acting complementary to real-life divinity, we’re subtly steered into perceiving those in the public eye in specific ways.
Archetypes are molds through which the athlete is accommodated and condensed into a digestible, easily understood package. The archetype of the underdog is the bread and butter of sports, from the baby-faced rookie to the walking sob story to the small team looking to make their homeland proud. Eventually, like Messi, the underdog becomes the powerhouse, who walks audiences through the heroic feats of their prime up until their golden years as a legacy act.
There are, however, outlying archetypes that are interesting to examine as irregularities in myth-making and audience reception. Opposite to the underdog sits the athlete whose rise is seen as manufactured, not nurtured. Either born with a firmly lodged silver spoon or into the cradle of a well-connected family, audiences instinctively recoil at a benefactor of nepotism. Though present in every imaginable industry, most prominently in entertainment, blatant privilege and a lack of hardship complicates personal investment into an athlete’s story. Disrupting the exclusive stage of athletic spectacle—, already perceived to be a breeding ground for corporate greed—, is a gargantuan feat and major plot point in the story of many beloved athletes.; being born already into the limelight is simply not as compelling.
Running along this thread of likeability and opposite to the benevolent heroes of sport are the more nefarious personalities. Such narratives are most obvious in professional wrestling; its relentless theatrics have done nothing to soothe the accusations of artificiality over the years. Wrestlers put on grotesque caricatures, with heels being perhaps the most intriguing and subversive. The heel thrives off of the jeers that makes the hero waver, exhibiting barbaric behavior to encourage this precise vitriol and embodying a personality you love to hate. There’s no such thing as negative attention in spectacle, and the heel, regardless of sincerity and sport, is a testament to it.
Character-making is an essential part of sport narratives. It sees the athlete take advantage of the plot that encapsulates them, building empires out of their story and brands out of their personality. A phenomenon of the mid-to late 20th century, the celebrity athlete transcends their discipline to become a presence in the mainstream– with the slight caveat of sacrificing relatability optics.
Emboldened by their performance on the field and the investment of audiences, celebrity athletes of the modern age resort to brand construction to secure their legacy. Through sponsorships, endorsements, career pivots and viral marketing tactics they’re able to pierce through the ceiling, an unstoppable supernova you can’t help but continue rooting for– here’s where you’d have your Tom Bradys and Simone Bileses.
LeBron James, in particular, is amongst the first case studies of celebrity athletes most think of. The undisputed face of the MBA, the 41-year-old forward for the Los Angeles Lakers has long-embodied what keeps an athlete successful –and sane– in the public eye; philanthropic, charismatic, and with enough star power to keep anything less than exceptional cloaked in mystique. Similarly, Serena Williams is recognized by her contemporaries as the greatest in the history of the sport, regardless of gender categories. Socially-conscious and assertive, Williams is particularly of note given the long-standing impact of her success– credited with increasing diversity in tennis, she represented a seismic shift in the conversation, one that now allowed for women to be at the forefront of athletics.
Returning at last to Messi, the definition of what a celebrity athlete must be is further called into question. Stoic and mild-mannered, the striker sets himself apart in a sport of remarkably flashy personalities and big mouths, standing anti-thethical to the legendary Diego Maradona before him and to contemporaries like Barcelona teammate Neymar Jr. and long-standing heel Cristiano Ronaldo. In spite of the different approaches Messi, James, and Williams have employed to curate their public self, what makes the three of them stand parallel with each other is their sizable impact on audiences.
Fandom and The Self
Everybody needs a hero– be it gods or athletes. As a figure in the public eye and character in and of itself, the athlete has power over not just their own narrative but over the invested viewer as well. As such, they’re given the opportunity to play a part in the ever-comprehensive, ever-multifaceted and nuanced process of identity-making. Much can be said about the commercialized personhood of the athlete. Not all athletes become celebrities; some are tethered to particularly impersonal or unpopular sports, some are not given the necessary tools, others simply do not care for the responsibility. But the athlete that does manage to transcend their original undertaking is positioned then as a role model, with the responsibility to perform with those watching at home in mind, molding the most impressionable along the way.
The systematic domination of men in sports have made them a place where modern masculinity is condensed and, in turn, shaped. Historically, the patriarchal values of fortitude and dominance that have been ingrained in the coming-of-age of boys see sports as naturally aspirational. Most revered male athletes embody these very values, from the rugged physicality to the apparent emotional fortitude, acting as constants in most boyhoods through which young men can find ambition and hope.
While the athlete as an individual cannot be entirely blamed for the issue of male chauvinism and its societal detriments, and the spirit of competition isn’t inherently harmful, the culture in which they exist is ripe for exclusionary ideals. In this binary of gender expression we find ourselves in, boys and men will bond over last night’s game in the blink of an eye, and this will be treated as physiological factoid.
To say most of these conversations make no room for (and actively alienate) The Other would be an understatement. It’s no wonder some women grow to resent sports altogether, seeing as they exist as a reminder of rooms a girl isn’t privy to because of gender politics she has yet to understand. The way one chooses to perform femininity isn’t an inherent barrier to the world of sports, the exclusionary values that sit embroidered at the core of sports are. Female athletes are much more prone to receive personal critiques entirely divorced from their game (such as jabs on personal lives and looks, to name a few), which go on to impact and, at times, taint the narrative. Returning to our idea of journalists and media personnel as storytellers, much of this disdain is enforced by the sports media audiences consume; from unflattering framing devices to misquotes and, there’s a severe tonal disconnect between the female athlete and the way her male counterpart is illustrated.
When a misogynist society is presented with misogynistic texts, they will keep accepting it as fact, particularly if it reinforces their idea of womanhood as either a.) a detractor or b.) something to be manipulated and dissected. Even now, where we think we’ve at the very least cracked the glass ceiling, we’re seeing the accomplishments of female athletes be reduced to their genetic makeup.
This is reminiscent of the case of Imane Khelif. During the 2024 Olympics, the Algerian boxer was embroiled in an intrusive, misformed hate campaign and backlash over her gender identity, questioning her eligibility to compete in the women’s welterweight event over claims that she was a man. This showcase of transphobia and misogyny goes to show how the very few female athletes we get to see in mainstream sports media are always just that– female. Regardless of their accomplishments, the battles they’ve fought and the hurdles they’ve overcome, they’re always set up to be tethered to femininity and whether they perform or embody it successfully (as in, in accordance to repressive, traditional gender roles). The female athletes whose success manages to sprawl on regardless, such as the aforementioned Biles and the now retired Williams, are still faced with a disproportionately critical eye from fans and detractors.
The exclusionary standing of sport rings true in more ways than one. Once again, to say that sporting institutions and the texts that cover them are both heavily biased against racial minorities and highly economically inaccessible would be a severe understatement. Much can be said about all the ways in which the mythmaking of sports hasn’t always been applicable to all athletes, or how corporations have utilized their influence to cloak deeper systematic issues around the world (“sportswashing”). Yet the appeals of sports and the athlete, the spectacle and all the hope they both garner, manage to persist – why?
Sports and Us
The power of narrative is not lost on people. On a global scale, events like the Olympics and the World Cup allow national teams to project prestige and cultural pride against the background of their athlete’s resilience. The host nation uses the infrastructure of its staging and cultural aesthetics to assert its presence in the public eye, while other participating nations leverage either histories of dominance or unexpected victories on stages where political influence is limited but not negligible. Decorated Chinese-American skier Eileen Gu, for example, has recently ruffled feathers over her decision to represent China in the 2026 Winter Olympics. At the core of this outrage lies the idea of sports as machinery through which soft power is obtained and ultimately weaponized; athletes are transformed as symbols of collective pride, making talents like Gu highly sought after by the states at play. It is here where we see the nations fighting not just for medals, but for legitimacy and standing.
This strategic acquisition of presence is calculated, the methodic craft of an image of progress and unity, capitalizing on the natural connection audiences develop with athletes. Governments and corporations alike may attempt to use events of this scale to launder reputations or distract audiences from pressing conversations, but beyond the cynicism at play, it’s important to delineate that sports audiences are not passive consumers. Regardless of states and sporting bodies, global publics decide which stories to accept, resist, or transcend alongside with.
Alongside Gu, no one has captured the hearts of the crowd quite like Alysa Liu has during this year’s Olympics. The 20-year-old figure skater had announced her retirement at the tail end of a bronze medal at the 2022 World Championships, citing burn-out. As per Liu, she had become utterly consumed by her sport, citing both familial and systemic pressures as factors that led to her struggling to keep finding enjoyment in that which had found so much success in already. Liu chose to take matters of her story into her own hands, choosing to leave the stage on a high. Two years later, Liu’s return was also entirely on her own terms, now back on the ice with a newfound mentality reliant on uncomplicated joy. Unapologetically alternative and subversive, Liu glided her way to two gold medals in both the women’s singles and team event. Liu’s classic success story, her display of boundaries in the face of ruthless rigidity, her glowing self-confidence, and her modern acuity have all made her the model athlete of today’s generation. Following her victory, Liu acknowledged her place in the narrative: “I'm glad that now there are a lot of people watching me, so I can show them everything I've come up with in my head and share my stories. I want to be a storyteller."
Ultimately, the spectator is co-creator of the meaning of sports and their mythology. The everlasting character of our attachment lies in this very intersection, the interplay between performance and projection at the core of spectacle. The systems that house our sports are flawed, as are the harmful ideologies that have found shelter in the arena of competition. Nonetheless, we gather to gawk at the athlete as they embody the melodramas of justice, merit, and possibility; stories that are irrevocably, palpably human.
