28th CESH Congress 2025, The Narrative of Sport: Themes, Authors, Stories, Perspectives, Università di Salerno

Event organizer: European Committee for Sports History (CESH), Società Italiana Storia dello Sport (SISS) and University of Salerno

Speakers: Dr. Valentina D’Auria, Dr. Anna Avallone (University of Salerno)

Paper: "The great thing about sport is that it makes you do things you didn’t think you were capable of doing”: a content analysis of Italian Paralympic athletes’ media self-narratives

Abstract: The first modern edition of the Paralympic Games was held in 1960 with the aim of involving athletes with disabilities in the international competitive sports arena. However, for decades media attention devoted to the Paralympics remained marginal compared to that reserved for the Olympic Games. A significant shift occurred with the London 2012 edition, which marked a turning point in the event’s visibility and contributed to the growing popularity of the Paralympics (Pate et al., 2014). Only in recent years have the Paralympic Games become a truly popular sporting event. Despite this, public narratives of Paralympic athletes’ performances are often tied to a rhetoric that borders on pity or sensationalism (Purdue & Howe, 2012; Page et al., 2022). As a result, telling Paralympic challenges frequently turns into excessive attention to athletes’ personal problems and an exaltation of disability as a “personal tragedy,” fostering stereotypes and prejudice.
With the aim of approaching athletes’ perspectives, we asked: How do Paralympic athletes perceive and narrate their own competitive experience? What meaning do they attribute to international-level sport competition? Our work stems from the need to understand how Paralympic athletes portray themselves through the use of social media. Through a content analysis of interviews given by 10 Paralympic athletes for the news outlet Ability Channel and for the Italian Paralympic Committee, we explore the main emerging themes, with particular attention to how discourse is constructed around the body, competition, and the meaning of sport in their experience.
Keywords: Paralympic Games, narrative, athletes, content analysis