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When Asian American Olympians Chloe Kim and Eileen Gu competed in their first Winter Games, they were treated differently by the U.S. media, a new University of Michigan study suggests.

Snowboarder Chloe Kim was celebrated as a "typical American teenager" by the media for competing for the United States in her first Olympics in 2018, while four years later, freestyle skier Eileen Gu was cast as an "ungrateful traitor" after opting to represent China instead of the U.S.

The work ispublishedin the journalCommunication & Sport.

Study corresponding author Doo Jae Park, a lecturer in sport management at the U-M School of Kinesiology and faculty affiliate of Asian/Pacific Islander American studies, and his co-authors are themselves part of the Asian diaspora. In undertaking the study, they sought to understand how a sense of belonging is created and contested for Asian Americans in the U.S.

Born and raised in California, Kim and Gu pursued different sporting paths: Kim is a two-time Olympic gold medalist snowboarder who rose to international fame after winning at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics. The daughter of Korean immigrants, she declined an invitation to join South Korea's national team and instead represented the U.S.

Conversely, Gu, a freestyle skier and model who became one of the most prominent faces of the 2022 Beijing Olympics, is the daughter of a Chinese immigrant mother and white American father. She chose to represent China, and won two gold medals and a silver at those Winter Games.

To understand how ideologies and power dynamics were embedded in the coverage of those events, Park and colleagues analyzed more than 200 newspaper articles published in English for the time period around each of the previous two Olympics. They narrowed down over 600 news sources to 116 reports on Kim and 106 reports on Gu to analyze how their identities were defined by the mainstream press.

Source: Phys.org