Theorizing Paula Radcliffe: Representing a Nation

Abstract

In setting the world record at the London Marathon in 2003, Paula Radcliffe not only beat her female competitors but also her countrymen becoming the fastest British runner of the year, male or female, making her the nation’s best hope for the Olympic Games in 2004. From this position, she garnered a significant amount of media attention, becoming Britain’s most famous runner. Yet as a representative of her nation, both symbolically and on the national team, her place remains complicated. Radcliffe’s significant accomplishments, which were in part understood as British success, were also constructed as a foil for the lack of British men’s success in racialized and gendered ways. To explicate mediated articulations of national identity, I examined UK print media constructions of Radcliffe focusing on three major events of her running career: her world record, her failure to finish at the 2004 Games, and her World Championship marathon win in 2005. I found that Radcliffe achieved conditional status as a representative of Britain, while this media coverage also maintained and buttressed gendered and racialized hierarchies in the complex construction of British identity.

The Death of a Female Boxer

“…199-208). Similar contradictory tendencies have also been shown for female athletes in nonsocialist-oriented countries in Europe and North America (Markula, 2009;Walton, 2010).…”

Riding in the shadows: The reaction of the British print media to Chris Froome’s victory in the 2013 Tour de France

“…Clearly, Chris Froome fulfils the white and male criteria, but while Walton (2010) argued that it was Paula Radcliffe's gender that marked her as an outsider, we might speculate that an additional factor is at play here. It would seem that Froome's African upbringing -although apparently celebrated by the British press -may ultimately have resulted in him enjoying only an ambivalent position as a British sporting hero and one that certainly sees him sit below Sir Bradley Wiggins in this regard.…”

“…Take it on the chin, reveal no weakness, be polite, move on. This was an incredible victory from an incredible gentleman (Slot, 2013a: 53). Froome was also lauded for his commitment and hard work in the same way as other British sporting heroes such as Sir Bradley Wiggins (Griggs et al, 2014), football manager Harry Redknapp (Griggs and Gibbons, 2012) and distance runner Paula Radcliffe (Walton, 2010):…”

One Guy Named Mo: Race, Nation and the London 2012 Olympic Games

“…Crucially, these identity politics and dominant celebrations of hyphenated identities have led rarely to a cessation of racial discrimination, sporting or otherwise, highlighting the limits to what Giardina (2003) refers to as 'stylish hybridity'. Indeed, the arrival of black male bodies as representative of sporting Britishness was accompanied by the exclusion of other communities of colour, especially women within them, via whitened, masculinised and heteronormative versions of citizenship (Hills & Kennedy, 2009;Samie, 2013;Thangaraj, 2015;Walton, 2010). Given his biography and intersectional ethno-religious identities, Mo Farah provides an original and enlightening case study, demonstrating both the novel and enduring forms of (sporting) racialized nationalism that are articulated in conjunction with minority ethnic sport stars.…”