Research On Image’ Characteristics, Positioning And Shaping’ Of Chinese Elite Athletes

The image of Chinese elite athletes loads historical and humanist characteristics of our nation, embodies the main melody in different times, reflects our profound understanding of changing the national image, arousing patriotic enthusiasm as well as hard work. It not only interprets competitive sports, but also displays politics, culture, economy and vicissitudes of the times. In mid and late 1990s, the explosive growth of new communicative technology with Internet as the representative provided opportunities for wider interaction among the public. At the same time, the image of Chinese elite athletes began to change from the role of single heroes, models to diverse perspectives, which gradually came into conflict with the public cognition, feelings and expectations towards it. The image of Chinese elite athletes has been precious resources for competitive sports and even the nation. How shall we locate it? How we can rebuild the new irreplaceable image of Chinese elite athletes in the public mind has become an urgent problem to be solved.This study uses literature content analysis, grounded theory analysis, free word association method and expert investigation method. The research work is divided into the following stages:In the first stage, interview videos of Chinese and foreign elite athletes are collected as the main qualitative research materials.50 elite athlete cases of different times, countries and sport events are chosen. Their historical evolution, career development differences between stages, and differences between nationalities are explored to find their location criteria.In the second stage, the "free word association" questionnaire is compiled in order to collect free word association descriptions with regard to Chinese elite athletes. In this way, the stereotype of Chinese elite athletes is explored to make up for the shortage of early media report and lay foundation for the later Chinese elite athletes’image.In the third stage, questionnaires are used to collect the opinions and suggestions of 52 domestic experts and scholars.In the fourth stage,671 texts from China Youth Daily, People’s Daily and other Chinese mainstream media with "Chinese elite athletes" as theme and 19 Olympic champions are chosen to study the formation background, influencing factors and blocking strategy of the current Chinese elite athletes. By this means theoretical foundation is laid to further build good public image for Chinese elite athletes.Conclusions of the study are as follows:1. The definition of Chinese elite athletes’image defines the public’s cognition and evaluation for their appearances, activities and achievements.2. The image of Chinese elite athletes contains 10 dimensions including view of honor, personality, success and failure, psychological statement, etc. With times changing, it has three professional developing stages in the aspects of training, mature, retired stages.3. The Chinese elite athlete figure develops with changes of times continuously. The development could be shown in the changes of views, such as the honor views, national views and figure characteristics views. And the Chinese elite athletes have their own figure characteristics, interior beauty to stink, and regulation to hegemony. The differences between Chinese and foreign elite athletes are mainly reflected in the encoding data tendency and cultural connotation of semantic differences.4. The public stereotype Chinese elite athletes’image classifies the national spirit, the spirit of the times, views of honor, etc into 8 categories. Among them, different from media abstraction category are the 3 categories newly added, namely, the external image, influence and interests, public figures. This difference is reflected in the changes of the times and the public demand for automation, equalization.5. The public stereotype Chinese elite athletes’image reflects the national spirit, which shows stable inheritance and continuity, but also displays the contradiction and divergence between the advertising media and the acceptance of the audience; the spirit of the times includes both the stable inheritance and the need to adjust or miss; the view of honor reflects that athletic performance may surpass the realm of spirit in materialized form; concept of personality is always a double-edged sword.6. Subjective experiences such as public social classification, occupation and age cause the stereotype of Chinese athlete’s image.7. Inferences are made according to the characteristics of the development of times and the results of Chinese elite athletes’ performance, together with expert interviews, to position the image of Chinese elite athletes as the "public figures" image.8. The four core areas of the public image are summarized as follows: public influence, speech act, influential factors and blocking strategy. Based on the event reporting, the theoretical model of elite Chinese athlete’s image is adopted.9. Shaping Chinese elite athletes public image divides into short, medium and long term. Verbal, behavior and attitude are three types of speech acts which shape in short term. Athlete’s individuals, related personnel factors and environmental factors shape in medium and long term. Organization administration, crisis public relation, and brokerage team are blocking strategies shaped in short, medium and long term for Chinese elite athletes’ public image figures.