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In the span of four years from 2018 to 2022, three consecutive Olympic Games were held in East Asia – namely PyeongChang 2018 in South Korea, Tokyo 2020 in Japan and Beijing 2022 in China. Given the geographic concentration of global multi-sports mega-events in the Far East, this period has been referred to as the ‘East Asian era' of the Olympic Games. This introduction to the special issue outlines two major themes of the changes during the East Asian era: (1) the shift of economic and geopolitical power from the West to the East; and (2) the changes and challenges offered by the Olympic Agenda 2020 reforms and the COVID-19 pandemic within East Asia. After that, each contribution will be introduced and briefly described. Overall, by collecting contributions focusing on the 2018–2022 Olympic Games, this special issue critically analyses the state of play in the formations of dominant and emerging discourses during the East Asia era and offers its implications for a broader understanding of the continuity and changes to the economic, political, social, cultural and ecological dimensions of the Olympic Movement.

The Olympics are a media behemoth. Much media coverage of the Games is straight-up sports fare delivered in the predictable rhythms of victory and defeat. However, with the Beijing 2022 Winter Games, US media outlets offered significant coverage exploring the political and human-rights concerns. This paper identifies and analyzes the predominant frames that US media outlets employed when covering the Beijing Olympics. The empirical data for this study derive from the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, the four most-circulated newspapers in the country. The timeframe includes the lead-up to the Games, the actual Olympics, and the aftermath. This systematic content analysis—which examines both hard news and opinion journalism—also engages in indexing analysis: tracking who journalists turn to for insight and comment and how this affects the discourse bandwidth and the emergence of predominant frames.

The purpose of the article is to explore the use of judo for nation branding, public diplomacy, and country image in the postponed Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. Judo was founded in Japan in 1882 as a martial art that embodies educational values of peace, respect, and controlling mind and body. Judo made its Olympic debut in Tokyo 1964 and gradually became one of the most internationally diverse sports in the Olympic Games. The study uses theoretical lenses drawn from nation branding, public diplomacy, country image, and related fields. The qualitative research is based on content analysis of press conferences, media guides, and international coverage of the judo competitions held in July 2021 at the Nippon Budokan. Based on three coding rounds of manual thematic analysis, four themes emerged from the data: (a) the sport and the host, (b) universal values, (c) geopolitics, and (d) the individual and the collective. The study is significant as it expands literature and adds value to practitioners on the role of judo, nation branding, public diplomacy, and country image, during a global pandemic and as the Olympic Movement enters a new era.

This article examines how major Japanese national newspapers - the Asahi Shimbun, the Mainichi Shimbun, the Yomiuri Shimbun, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, andthe Sankei Shimbun- discussed the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as the “Recovery Olympics” in relation to radioactive materials as a key post-Fukushima environmental contamination issue. Although many scholars have critically examined the concept of the Recovery Olympics in the context of the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, this study employs Beck’s risk society and Boykoff’s celebration capitalism theories to distinguish between the recovery discourses of the earthquake and tsunami versus the Fukushima disaster. It then explores the media’s depiction of the Recovery Olympics in relation to radioactive contamination. Using Fairclough’s dialectical-relational approch to critical discourse analysis, this study demonstrates that the leading Japanese national newspapers localized the issue of post-Fukushima environmental contamination within Fukushima Prefecture, thereby obscuring broader impacts for the Olympics. Additionally, it uncovers how these newspapers emphasized safety standards, transforming post-Fukushima environmental contamination below such standards into a symbol legitimizing the Recovery Olympics.

Identity in sports forms a key stage in which globalization is both constituted and resisted and where various contentions and nuanced dynamics remain to be unpacked. In this paper, we examined the media’s ability, from China and the US separately, to construct and deconstruct the national identity of a naturalized athlete, Eileen Gu (Gu Ailing), an American-born Chinese athlete, during the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games. By combining frame analysis with critical discourse analysis (CDA), salient differences were found in terms of the media frames and discourses used by China and the US in their adoption and interpretations of “sports role”, “ethnic role”, “social role”, and “entertainment role”. Furthermore, we pointed out that the national media from both countries simultaneously attempt to legitimize their stance on Gu’s national identity and stress the maximization of each nation’s own interest. The findings shed light on our existing understanding of the complex identity of naturalized athletes in the context of globalization and argue that media discourses, as constructed by the two countries, remain deeply rooted in an overdetermined East-West binary.

The marching of North and South Korea under one flag at the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics opening ceremony was celebrated as a step towards greater harmony in the region. North Korea’s attendance and widespread goodwill during the “Peace Games” even led to talk of a joint Korea bid for the 2032 Summer Olympics. While the 2018 Games were successful in bringing the nations together, the opportunities for long-lasting peace – and a memorable Games legacy – were not achieved. Utilising thematic analysis across 551 articles from four online news publications from North Korea, South Korea, China and Japan, this study examines regional narratives of North Korea’s participation in PyeongChang 2018. The results highlight portrayals in the media towards North Korea and the broader key themes of war, conflict, peace and reconciliation. Overall, it is evident that the hope generated by the nation’s participation in 2018 was a false dawn for long-term aspirations of unification, and reflective of the freeze and thaw approach to engagement by North Korea with its neighbour.

Affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games were postponed for a year. While getting through with the organizing of an Olympic Games amid a global pandemic is seen as a success by many (‘The Good’), it was overshadowed by the relentless virus as the Games closed with a muted spectacle in 2021 (‘The Bad’). Pushing on with the Games after the postponement, at the height of the pandemic, has resulted in strong criticisms and caused damage to the organizers (‘The Ugly’). This study seeks to assess the crisis communication strategies implemented by the organizers as they navigated the capricious condition of trudging on with a pandemic era sport spectacle. Through examining the organizers’ crisis communications to the challenges that emerged and public reactions to the strategies, this study seeks to understand the outcome of the strategies on the organizational image and reputation. It also provides reflections on the management of the Games through the COVID-19 pandemic. In this regard, it is argued that the situational crisis communication theory offers a useful framework that can provide theoretical connections between crisis management in a sports mega-event and organizational response strategies.

As sport has become more globalized, there has been an increase in the number of athletes who have changed their nationality to maximize their chances to compete in international competitions. In order to maximize its chances at its home hosted Winter Olympic Games, the Chinese government authorized many foreign-born athletes to gain Chinese citizenship to compete for China. The purpose of the study was to explore how Chinese social media users perceived athlete naturalization of Chinese athletes during the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games. Through sentiment analysis and thematic analysis, results found that Chinese spectators generally had positive emotions toward these naturalized Olympians. Online discussions mainly focused on three topics: expressing their attitudes toward athlete naturalization, questioning the legitimacy of the strategy, and discussing athletes’ heritage and cultural identities. This research hopes to broaden our understanding of the sport migrant issue in China, the perceptions of athletes who have naturalized, and the sentiments that Chinese consumers have of naturalized athletes at the Winter Olympic Games that were held in their country.

How Olympics reporters understand the Games and their role within them has implications for what and how they report. At stake in journalists’ storytelling choices are the representations of the Olympics themselves as well as representations of the host city and country — representations that can serve to bolster powerful institutions and dominant ideologies, or to challenge them and open new opportunities for change. Despite the importance of journalists to the production of the Olympic spectacle, there has been relatively little research that examines how Olympics reporters think about what it means to report on the Games. This paper explores what journalists’ perspectives and experiences can reveal about the opportunities and challenges for reporting from a “critical stance” at the Games. I highlight three key themes from interviews with journalists who reported on Tokyo 2020 for influential English-language publications: the role of awe in Olympics reporting; impressions of what readers want; and the role of reporters’ experiences at past Olympic Games. I suggest that at Tokyo 2020 there were more opportunities for critical reporting that portrayed Olympics problems as exceptional, rather than structural, although the space for structural critique may be growing.