The Fall of the Queen of Nordic Skiing: A comparative analysis of the Swedish and Norwegian media coverage of the Therese Johaug scandal

For decades, sport has been a vehicle for the creation of national identity (Boyle & Haynes, 2009) and a very conspicuous way of demonstrating national performance (Bairner, 2015; Li et al., 2016). Historically, the best and perhaps most radical example is the 1936 Berlin Olympics which, under the aegis of Nazism, presented Germany through the works of Leni Riefenstahl. Thus, one can argue that sport is one of many social practices that contributes to the construction of “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1983). More recently, hosting mega-events has been described as part of a nation’s soft power strategies (Grix & Houlihan, 2014), and the rivalry inherently embedded in elite sport has been exploited in attempts at portraying a nation’s ascendency (Li et al., 2016). Accordingly, this interdependency makes nations vulnerable once sport is hit by scandals. Striking features of sport scandals are that they lead to intense mass-media coverage (Carstairs, 2003; Hughes & Shank, 2005; Kozman, 2013; Laine, 2006) and, subsequently, often to radical political and organisational changes (Amegashie, 2006; Hanstad et al., 2008).

Doping has played a significant role in several sporting scandals. The positive test of Canadian track and field sprinter Ben Johnson shortly after his victory at the 1988 Olympic Games is a hallmark incident (Blackwell, 1991; Wagner & Pedersen, 2014). Ten years later, the Festina drug scandal revealed the systematic abuse and procurement of illegal performance enhancing drugs such as EPO and growth hormones prior to and during the Tour de France (Christiansen, 2005; Mignon, 2003). In some countries, like Germany, national TV broadcasters decided not to follow cycling events such as the Tour de France for a number of years, due to ongoing reports of doping practices. Incidents of doping have regularly been a delicate issue in mass media coverage (BBC, 2015), including doping scandals emerging in Scandinavian countries, which have a strong anti-doping profile (Wagner & Hanstad, 2011).

On October 13, 2016, Norway was shocked by the news that the country’s number one cross-country skier had tested positive for the anabolic steroid Clostebol in the previous month. In a short press conference, Therese Johaug gave a brief statement in order to prove her innocence in the matter. The federation’s doctor, who accompanied her, supported her story: She had taken medication for her sunburned lips provided by the team doctor on September 3 in Italy. She stressed that she had nothing to hide and she would tell the truth. Then the doctor answered questions on how he could give her this medication.

In brief, from September 4–15, Johaug used the prescribed medication after first checking with the doctor that it was not on any doping lists, and also informing her coach. On September 16, Johaug was tested by Antidoping Norway; she informed them that she had used the medication Trofodermin, containing Clostobol. On October 4, 2016, Johaug was informed that her test was positive, and on October 12, she informed her sponsors before announcing it to the wider public the following day. On October 19, she was suspended for two months while awaiting the decision in the case. On February 10, 2017, she was banned for 13 months. Her sentence (one month shorter than that suggested by prosecutors at Antidoping Norway) gave her the opportunity to compete in the 2018 Olympic Winter Games. However, on March 7, the International Ski Federation (FIS) successfully appealed against the 13-month doping ban because they judged it too short. Accordingly, she could not participate in the Olympic Games in 2018.

On the one hand, Scandinavian countries share similarities due to their common social democratic welfare-state legacy (Esping-Andersen, 1990), and, in terms of organised sport, a shared feature is voluntarism anchored in civil society associations (Bairner, 2010). Furthermore, political scandals in Nordic countries have been receiving increased media attention and academic interest in recent years (Allern & Pollack, 2012). On the other hand, the intense rivalry between Sweden and Norway is far from a recent phenomenon (Goksøyr, 2005). Using these similar characteristics and the notion of rivalry, we compare how the Norwegian and Swedish media have covered the Johaug scandal, with the aim of discovering how constructions of subjectivity, national identity, anti-doping policy and the role of cross-country skiing are interrelated. Applying a critical discourse analytical framework (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999; Fairclough, 1992 Fairclough, 2003), we investigate and compare Norwegian and Swedish media coverage in the period between the press release and the announcement of the appeal by the FIS (October 13, 2016 to March 7, 2017).

In the pioneering days of TV broadcasting, the death of British cyclist Tom Simpson – assumed to be due to amphetamines – during the 1967 Tour de France was immortalised as he fell off his bike climbing Mont Ventoux (Mignon, 2003). More recently, the wide-ranging doping abuse among Finnish Nordic skiing athletes during the 2001 FIS Nordic World Ski Championship in Lahti has had a direct influence on stricter anti-doping policies (Hanstad, 2008). In 2013, Lance Armstrong confessed to taking banned substances in an Oprah Winfrey interview (Dimeo, 2014). The recent exclusion of Russian athletes from the 2016 Olympic Games drew a picture of a Russian state-sponsored doping program connected with many sports, resembling what used to happen in the former East Germany (Ungerleider, 2001). Thus, doping has caused ongoing scandals for decades.

The most significant political impact of the 1998 Tour de France scandal was the creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency in 1999 (Ferstle, 2001; Houlihan, 2002), and later the introduction of a global and harmonised set of rules known as the World Anti-Doping Code (WADC; Houlihan, 2004), emphasising a common set of rules governing all kinds of elite sport. The first WADC, introduced in 2003, made it clear that the global policy was designed to fit individuals and organisations, not states and governments involved in doping orchestration. One key element since the initiation of the Code has been the strict liability paragraph. Unlike other legally binding regulations, this places the burden of responsibility on the athlete, who is held liable for any substance found in the bodily fluids during a test. The responsibility for remaining “clean” is, therefore, up to the athlete:

It is each Athlete’s personal duty to ensure that no Prohibited Substance enters his or her body. Athletes are responsible for any Prohibited Substance or its Metabolites or Markers found to be present in their Samples. Accordingly, it is not necessary that intent, Fault, negligence or knowing Use on the Athlete’s part be demonstrated in order to establish an anti-doping rule violation under Article 2.1.

The policies laid down in the WADC have certainly not been embraced without controversies and conflicts, as a variety of studies have indicated (Efverström et al., 2016; Elbe & Overbye, 2014; Hanstad et al., 2010; Hanstad & Loland, 2009; Houlihan, 2014; McNamee & Tarasti, 2010; Møller, 2009 Møller, 2016). Likewise, studies on sport and national identity construction related to mass-media coverage have for years been of academic interest (Bairner, 2015; Boyle & Haynes, 2009), and studies have shown that doping accusations have led to significant differences in media coverage depending on national context (Bie & Billings, 2015).

Doping cases often radically change the image of a sport that is linked to national identity constructions. For instance, the supremacy of the up-and-coming American road cyclists, symbolised by the US Postal team conquering the terrain from European athletes, was destroyed by the exposure of Lance Armstrong’s doping (Dimeo, 2014). Russian state-orchestrated doping regimes undermined and de-legitimised President Putin’s endeavours to bring Russia back to the top of the global sport scene by being successful in competition, as well as hosting mega events such as the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014 and the FIFA World Cup in 2018. Not only have doping scandals discredited the sport disciplines and the sport organisations affiliated to the disciplines, but they have also had a negative impact on national identity, as exemplified by Laine’s notion of “national shame” following two incidents of Finnish skiers testing positive for doping abuse (2006).

When it comes to the interrelations between sport and national identity construction, Scandinavia is no exception and the immense rivalry between Norway and Sweden started with the sportification of skiing (Goksøyr, 2005). The annual 50km in Holmenkollen, Norway, was hosted for the first time in 1888, and from the first race, it was a Nordic battle. In both Sweden and Finland, cross-country skiing was a major sport before ice hockey. Worldwide, cross-country skiing is a minor sport; hence, the rivalries between the Nordic countries are also rooted in the fact that not many nations focus as seriously on cross-country skiing as the Nordic countries do (Gotaas, 2013). Whereas cross-country skiing is the national sport of Norway (albeit with fewer members of clubs than football; see Kristiansen, 2017) it plays a less conspicuous, but still very important, role in Sweden.

The two Scandinavian countries share more than their love of the same sports. From 1380 until 1814, Norway had formed a union with Denmark. In 1814, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, Norway was ceded to Sweden, as Denmark had sided with the French in the wars. The union with Sweden lasted until 1905. During this period, opposition to Swedish control grew in Norway, and Norwegian romantic nationalism was part of this cultural outlook. Hence, what was considered uniquely Norwegian culture was found among the farmers and peasants in rural districts in Norway.

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson was one of the most prominent figures of his time, and received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1903. His peasants’ tales support the idea of the bonde, or peasant, as the backbone of the Norwegian nation, as he was a lineal descendant of the man of the sagas. The first one was Synnøve Solbakken (the family name translates literally as “sunny hill”), published in 1857 (published in English in 1858 under the title Trust and Trial). In many ways, Synnøve, with her light hair, big blue eyes and role as a symbol of the good in people, has become the ideal of the true Norwegian woman. Therese Johaug, as we will argue, fits very well into this description of the archetypal Norwegian woman due to her rural upbringing.

A scandal can be defined as an act of transgression that is mediated and observed by a wider audience (Adut, 2005; Thomson, 2000; Storm & Wagner, 2015). The mass media, including the proliferation of various social media, seem to speed up the number and extent of scandals due to the fact that acts of transgression gain immediate momentum, reaching an audience at a hitherto unknown speed (Allern & Pollack, 2012). Referring explicitly to sport scandals, Rowe (1997) argues that scandals are events which contradict audiences’ expectations of celebrities and/or athletic role models. Also, by drawing attention to imbalanced expectations, Storm and Wagner (2015) argue that a second phase of a sport scandal occurs when its appearance reaches a wider audience, followed by a third phase of intense moral discussion and crisis communication. In this way, scandals can be perceived as social dramas in which society’s codes are negotiated (Kantola & Vesa, 2013). Having these characteristics in mind, we argue that critical discourse analysis is a fruitful theoretical approach for a comparative study dealing with the phase following immediately after the transgression itself. The act of transgression – Therese Johaug testing positive – only became a scandal when it was mediated to a wider audience at the press conference. Subsequently, it initiated a process in which additional discourses challenged the hitherto stable order of discourse that formerly ascribed meaning to a successful female Norwegian cross-country skier.

A fundamental assumption within critical discourse analysis is that we can distinguish between three layers of analysis: text, discourse, and social practice (Fairclough, 1992Fairclough, 2003). These layers are interconnected in a dialectical interplay. Text, our empirical unit of analysis, is part of a discourse practice as media texts draw upon, modify, mirror, and/or transform various discourses. Fairclough (2003) provides a comprehensive analytical set-up when conducting a critical discourse analysis. For practical reasons our approach is more selective: we adopt the concept of “style” as we analyse our media texts. Among other aspects, the concept is here used in discussions on “how people identify themselves and are identified by others” (Fairclough, 2003: 159). In particular, our analysis dwells upon the latter, outlining and comparing the identification by others through media representations of Johaug. Inspired by Li (2009), we link this representation to constructions of national identity – for instance, by looking at us/them distinctions (see also Bie & Billings, 2015). The power of a certain discourse is linked to notions of subjectivity, which is another key feature of our analysis: on the one hand, we investigate who is granted the right to speak in and through the texts and to distinguish between morally acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. This idea is related to Foucault’s notion of the subject as a dispersion of positions (1972). On the other hand, subjectivity also refers to how Johaug is created as an object (e.g., whether she is represented as an individual actor or as a victim of circumstances). In this discursive process, where style intersects with constructions of national identity and perceptions of subjectivity, intertextuality refers to an understanding of a text not as something that occurs or is created in isolation, but as an entity in dialogue with, or composed of snatches of, previous texts. Accordingly, style promotes certain national identity constructions and ascribes subjectivity to Johaug. Thus, we adopt a three-layer analytical framework through which we see the discursive articulations related to the Johaug scandal as parts of a wider social practice that revolves around a practice that tries to fix meaning frames in the intersection between doping, Nordic skiing, and national identity construction.

Our research design is inspired by the framework suggested by Carvalho (2008). Unlike several studies setting out from a critical discourse analytical perspective, we do not intend to conduct an analysis focusing narrowly on text composition (e.g. applying a toolkit from sociolinguistics). Moreover, time plays an important role as we investigate how a scandal developed over a period of nearly five months; thus, we go beyond the narrow timespan often reflected in critical discourse analytical studies (Carvalho, 2008).

Our textual analysis has subjectivity as its pivotal point. We identify who is represented as a subject in the texts (i.e. who is given a voice during the early phase of a scandal). In particular, Therese Johaug is created as an object; texts talk about her, but simultaneously she can be ascribed subjectivity – she “does” things. We combine our focus on subjectivity with representations of national identity and style (e.g. how Nordic skiing is linked to nationality). This procedure resembles the textual and discursive levels of analysis found in the framework drawn up by Fairclough (1992, 2003). We link this to the contextual level suggested by Carvalho (2008) in order to understand these two first levels as parts of a wider social practice. The comparative-synchronic analysis seeks to compare texts within a similar period of time with other texts from the same period but from a different national context, which we finally link to a historical-diachronic analysis, as our aim is to explain the similarities and differences identified in the previous steps. Here the historical conditions of Nordic skiing and anti-doping policies will be taken into consideration.

The procedure used is as follows: All texts used in the study were published between October 13, 2016, and March 7, 2017. We collected online texts only. Each text was copied and converted into Word files. We used the search term “Therese Johaug”, thus avoiding narrow search criteria. For both countries, a public service channel and a tabloid press were selected to illustrate the distinctiveness of each medium (e.g., tabloids often favour flashy, sensational stories, whereas tax-funded public service providers often are less inclined towards sensationalism). In addition, and because we departed from a Norwegian context, we included texts from a traditional newspaper as a third Norwegian media source. The reading of the texts went through two rounds: the first round took place simultaneously with the collection of texts, in order to get an immediate and broad overview. The second round was a more systematic reading, based on a theory-driven approach following a template for reading (see Appendix A). Texts were read in their original language (Norwegian and Swedish), but direct quotes appearing in the following sections are translated into English by the authors. Our analysis set out by first exploring the Norwegian coverage, which was subsequently compared with the Swedish coverage. Despite having gathered 940 texts, our analysis is qualitative and interpretive in nature: we do not strictly compare by numbers (e.g., number of articles in each media or number of appearances by certain actors). Texts used for the empirical basis of this study are from Norway Aftenposten, AP (n = 176), VG (n = 249) and nrk. no (n = 196); and, from Sweden, Expressen (n = 235) and svt.se (n = 84). Norwegian texts were accessed using Retriever, while Swedish texts were accessed directly via the media’s webpages. Short references (to source and date) are mentioned in the analytical section; complete references are listed in Appendix B.

Limitations that may be mentioned, therefore, include the lack of detailed insights into single text compositions. Moreover, since we excluded visual features, readers’ comments and Youtube-like clips, we deviate from the framework put forth by Carvalho (2008). While texts are easy to compare, images, structural organisation and layout play important roles, and this is a limitation of the study that should be mentioned. Finally, our study does not address occurrences before or after the outbreak of the scandal, as we do not use empirical sources prior to the announcement of the anti-doping rule violation.

The main search among the three Norwegian sources resulted in 621 articles. In order to provide an overview of the development of the scandal, Figure 1 highlights the main peaks, which are: the first press conference (week 41, 2016); the second press conference (week 42, 2016); Antidoping Norway’s decision that Johaug would receive a 14-month suspension (week 48, 2016); the hearing at Ullevaal (week 4, 2017); and, finally, the announcement of the 13-month suspension (week 7, 2017).

Figure 1

The period under investigation has the characteristics of Phases Two and Three in the model proposed by Storm and Wagner (2015). Phase Two signifies the period of the dissemination of information to a wider audience, often focusing on what has happened, where and how (e.g. by introducing the reader to the prohibited substance, which was used in the former East Germany), and then gradually leading to Phase Three, which entails a moral discussion and crisis discussion: Who is to blame? How could this happen? And what will be the consequences for Norwegian cross-country skiing?

How can we explain these differences? Returning to the historical-diachronic section, we will construct two possible contextual frames in which we point to Fairclough’s (1992, 2003) theory: that discourse practice is part of a wider social practice. First, as Norwegians have historically played a prominent role in promoting a severe anti-doping policy (Hanstad & Houlihan, 2015; Wagner & Hanstad, 2011), the sudden appearance of doping within the boundary of one’s own system may lead to a situation resembling national shame (Laine, 2006). Similarly to other studies (e.g. Bie & Billings, 2015; Li et al., 2016), our study shows that a nation’s own media can exhibit a desire to protect its own national identity linked to a sport by defending the athlete under accusation. Accordingly, it is hardly a surprise that a rival nation – in this case, Sweden – performs the role of the opponent. Rather, one can argue that the Johaug case is an extension of an existing rivalrous relation between Sweden and Norway, as described by Goksøyr (2005).

We argue that the Norwegian way of dealing with the Johaug case shares similarities with a version of the NIMBY (Not in my Backyard) syndrome (Kinder, 2018): for instance, you may support the creation of workplaces, but when it comes to settling a factory near to your own house, resistance is mobilised (Wexler, 1996). Arguing in favour of global anti-doping policy, including adhering strongly to the strict liability principle, suddenly becomes questionable when one’s own star athletes are suffering from effects of this policy. Nothing tastes as bitter as your own medicine.

A NIMBY approach is a tactic employed for a nation in order to avoid ending up in a situation resembling the national shame witnessed in Finland in 2001 (Laine, 2006). The Johaug case is potentially disastrous for Norway, as it not only impacts their national sport, cross country skiing, but also undermines the nation’s identity as a global anti-doping pioneer. Interestingly, the general sentiment in Norway remained that Johaug was innocent; it might be that the Synnøve Solbakken image protected her. During her ban period, she showed off a brave face and remained true to herself and her own ethical values. When returning to sport, she admitted that it had been hard – but she had grown from the experience, both personally and as an athlete: in the 2019 FIS Nordic World Ski Championships (Nordic WSC) in Seefeld, Johaug won three events and she became the “queen” of the championship.

Second, some elements of the Swedish reaction resemble a rhetoric known from social conflicts, or what Bairner (2015: 375) calls “competing identities”. In his Luhmann-inspired analysis of the role of sport in contemporary society, Norwegian sociologist Jan-Ove Tangen (2004) claims that the function of modern sport is to compare the progression of states. This mirror function of sport has often compensated for warfare. This approach is in line with the idea of sport fulfilling the role of a soft-power strategy used by nations to position themselves within a global competitive foreign policy landscape (Grix & Houlihan, 2014). If we adopt this understanding, the Swedish reactions are turned into more than “just sport” as texts literally mediate social practices rooted in a competitive game, where states and political interests compare and compete with each other through sport. The historical study undertaken by Goksøyr (2005) provides rich examples of how sport is used for measuring and comparing the performance of these two rival Scandinavian nations. This rivalry can even occasionally be used as a stepping stone for one nation, like Sweden, to expose its supremacy beyond the Swedish-Norwegian axis of tension, which, according to Boyle and Haynes (2009), can correlate with the growing importance of sport in public life. The distinction between sport news and regular news is vanishing. Accordingly, the Johaug case cannot just be seen as sport news, but news per se.

The Johaug scandal supports existing research (Hanstad, 2008; Hanstad, Smith & Waddington, 2008; Wagner & Pedersen, 2014) in that the incident generated organisational changes: Norwegians were forced to investigate asthma practices, incorporate medical practices used in Sweden, update educational efforts, and optimise administrative procedures in federations. What the case also reveals is the delicate nature of the strict liability principle, and thus adds to an ongoing concern about athletes’ rights (McNamee & Tarasti, 2010; Møller, 2014 Møller, 2016). This should not only be an issue for Scandinavian countries, but even encompass concerns for athletes living in cities in Russia.