Political communication in Olympic-related bills of congress: A critical discourse analysis

Abstract

This paper examines Olympic-related bills in the U.S. Congress over the past five decades using critical discourse analysis (CDA). By integrating text mining with the discourse-historical approach (DHA), the study identifies the characteristics, themes, and strategies employed by policymakers to construct the Olympics within political discourse from 1973 to 2022. The results reveal that the Olympics are portrayed as a multifaceted instrument with the potential to advance legislative agendas, promote national identity, and serve as a venue for ideological and power struggles. Furthermore, the discourse has shifted from direct confrontation to more normative and moderate expressions. These findings provide valuable insights into the interplay between sports and political communication, contributing to a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics underlying the Olympics.

Keywords

critical discourse analysis discourse-historical approach Olympics political communication text mining

Introduction

The Olympic Games have always been one of the most influential global sporting events, drawing the participation and attention of nations worldwide. Rooted in strong social and cultural attributes (Jarvie, 2006), they emphasize universal values like fairness, peace, and friendship. As Coubertin envisioned, people come to the Olympic arena for peace and depart with a deep sense of friendship (De Coubertin, 1989). The Olympic Charter further affirms this vision, stating that Olympism seeks to use sport to promote the development of humanity, with the ultimate goal of fostering a peaceful society (International Olympic Committee, 2024). While the ideal of achieving peace through sport, free from political influence, is widely embraced, it often contrasts with the complexities of reality.

As numerous studies have demonstrated, the Olympic movement has been highly political from the very beginning. The decision to host the first modern Olympic Games in Greece was a politically charged one, with the Games serving as a tool to strengthen Greek national identity (Hobsbawm, 1992). Throughout the 20th century, the Games increasingly became a stage for showing political tensions. The 1936 Berlin Olympics were utilized for Nazi propaganda (Murray, 1992), while Cold War rivalries led to the boycotts of the 1980 and 1984 Games (Guttmann, 1988). In recent years, the Olympics have further evolved into a platform for political communication, widely regarded as a venue to showcase soft power, convey diplomatic messages, and disseminate ideologies (Boykoff, 2022; Dubinsky, 2024; Giulianotti, 2015).

Discourse serves as a way of political communication (van Dijk, 1997). Carefully designed and orchestrated, it selectively constructs worldviews and influences people’s understanding of reality (McNair, 2017). In recent years, with the intensification of national power struggles and advancements in communication, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to political communication beyond the Olympic venue. For instance, the Associated Press politicized the Sochi Olympics by linking Sochi to the former Soviet Union and heavily emphasizing Russia’s repressive political power (Liu, 2016). USA Today used a human rights frame to claim that the 2022 Beijing Olympics were meticulously arranged by the Chinese government (Boykoff, 2022). However, political discourse are not limited to the media; they also involve political actors, who strategically influence public opinion and policy agendas (McNair, 2017). Compared to the media discourse, political discourse is more specialized, involving complex political, economic, and cultural issues (Guetzkow, 2010). Therefore, it is necessary to explore the Olympic narrative from a political discourse perspective.

One way to gain insight into national policies and politics is by examining the legislative branch of government, whose discourse forms an integral part of political discourse (Wang, 2020). Congressional bills are “legislative proposals from the House of Representatives and Senate within the United States Congress” (U.S. Government Publishing Office, 2024). The issues or policies proposed in these bills are often driven by complex political motivations and interests (Grossmann and Pyle, 2013). For example, Zhang and Wang (2023) analyzed bills related to China in the 115th–117th Congress, revealing how values like freedom and democracy are used to justify ideological confrontation and support decoupling from China. Bendix and Jeong (2024) examined congressional legislation from 1971 to 2016 that restricted presidential defense programs and foreign aid, finding that ideology was the most consistent factor of whether members introduced related bills.

As scholars note, congressional bills often conceal underlying power dynamics and strategic intentions. While the Olympics also reflects political dynamics, few studies have utilized congressional data. This article analyzes how the Olympics are constructed by the U.S. Congress, based on case studies of bills introduced over the past 50 years, from 1973 to 2022. Drawing on CDA, we attempt to explicate the discursive strategic of the Olympics as a global event, as well as the ideology and interests that underpin it.

Theoretical framework

Political discourse refers to discourse that occurs in the context of political institutions or practices and is primarily produced by political actors (van Dijk, 1997). The study of political discourse helps to identify the ideologies that political actors seek to spread (Fairclough, 2001). By analyzing how political discourse conveys ideologies, researchers can understand how public opinion is shaped and how certain narratives become dominant or resist opposition (van Dijk, 1997). The discourse of policy elites is undoubtedly a significant form of political discourse and holds unique value. Therefore, it is crucial to study political discourse related to the Olympics to uncover its role within political contexts.

This study employs the discourse-historical approach (DHA) to examine the Olympic-related discourse of Congress. DHA, first developed by Ruth Wodak, is a key approach within the broader field of CDA (Wodak, 2001). Different from other CDA theories, DHA attempts to expand beyond the linguistic dimension, incorporating historical, political, sociological, and psychological dimensions into discourse analysis (Weiss and Wodak, 2003). DHA suggests analyzing texts on three levels: (1) topics/themes; (2) discursive strategies; and (3) linguistic means and language realizations (Wodak, 2001). Discursive strategies are characterized as plans of action adopted to achieve specific aims (Wodak, 2015). These strategies are summarized into several categories: referential/nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivation, representation, intensification, and mitigation (Wodak, 2001). Among them, argumentation is commonly employed in media and political discourse for justification (Ye and Thomas, 2020).

The application of DHA in political discourse enables a deeper exploration of the underlying ideologies (Wodak, 2015). In recent years, many scholars have used this approach to study how discourse functions as a tool for political influence and the dissemination of ideologies (Nagy, 2023; Němcová, 2024). However, most studies have relied on qualitative research (Munawar et al., 2023) or traditional corpus linguistics methods, such as frequency, keywords, N-grams, and collocations (Zhang et al., 2023). Recent advancements in computational linguistics, such as text mining and machine learning, offer significant potential to improve the efficiency, and accuracy of text analysis, uncovering deeper patterns and insights within discourse (Gothai et al., 2024). One important feature of DHA is its interdisciplinarity (Wodak, 2015). Therefore, we combine text mining with discourse analysis to examine Olympic-related bills of the U.S. Congress. Drawing on DHA, this study aims to answer three research questions:

RQ1: What are the characteristics and changes in the Olympic-related bills over the past 50 years?

RQ2: What are the similarities and differences in the themes of Olympic-related bills during different periods?

RQ3: How do the Olympic-related bills reflect the interplay of discourse, power, and ideology?

Methodology

Data collection

We selected the official website of the U.S. Congress (https://www.congress.gov) as our source for data collection. This website provides the latest information on Congress, including legislative activities, bill texts, and hearing records. Users can search for specific bills and issues, as it records each legislator’s legislative activities and summarizes the content of each bill.

On the Congress website, we used “Olympics” as the search term, resulting in a total of 1737 bills related to the Olympics. A congressional term typically lasts for 2 years, and the earliest Olympic-related bills we found were from the 93rd Congress, while content from the 118th Congress is still being updated. Therefore, we focused on the bills from the 93rd to the 117th Congress for our study. Based on this, we excluded two categories of bills: one category is amendments, which typically do not introduce new policy proposals; the other category includes bills that have weak relevance to the Olympic movement. Ultimately, we identified 708 bills, spanning from 1973 to 2022.

From the collected data, we built a corpus and divided it into three sub-corpora aligned with major historical shifts. Prior to 1992, the world was in the Cold War era. After the end of the Cold War, the world entered a period of rapid globalization. Following the 2008 financial crisis, the pace of globalization slowed, ushering in the slowbalization period (Botelho et al., 2021). Accordingly, we organized the sub-corpora by congressional sessions: the 93rd–102nd, the 103rd–109th, and the 110th–117th Congresses. This segmentation enables us to analyze the characteristics of Olympic discourse across different periods and to reveal the evolving trends in policymakers’ discourse on the Olympics.

Analytical procedures

This study was conducted with text mining, which has recently received attention in the field of discourse analysis (Demirel et al., 2024; Liu, 2024). By integrating natural language processing (NLP), statistics, and machine learning, text mining enables the automated extraction of information from text, thus improving the efficiency, and objectivity of the analysis (Shamshiri et al., 2024). In this study, we incorporated text mining into CDA to uncover the linguistic and discursive mechanisms underlying Olympic-related bills.

First, we used Python to perform text preprocessing. Pronouns, numbers, and other irrelevant elements were removed. Second, we used the NetworkX library to construct a co-occurrence network of the text, combining TF-IDF and Jaccard coefficients (Oh and Kim, 2023). We then applied the latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model, which is widely used in text mining to identify latent topics within large text corpora. The number of topics is a crucial parameter in the LDA model. An insufficient number of topics may result in information loss and oversimplification, while an excessive number can lead to overly narrow topic coverage, diminishing their distinctiveness (Blei et al., 2003). Based on the coherence score of the three sub-corpora (Iammarino et al., 2020), we determined the optimal number of topics to be 7, as illustrated in Figure 1. Figure 2 shows the LDA visualization, with the left part mapping topic distributions, and the right part listing the 30 most relevant terms per topic to aid thematic interpretation (Sievert and Shirley, 2014).

Figure 1.

Coherence score.

Figure 2.

LDA visualization in Olympic-related bills.

LDA merely provides a flexible framework for uncovering hidden thematic structures; it is up to researchers to interpret these topics and consolidate them into broader themes that offer a cohesive narrative (Kozlowski et al., 2019). Accordingly, we labeled the themes and conducted a discursive strategy analysis based on the topics. Considering the attributes of the Olympics and legislative bills, we hypothesized three major themes—economic, political, and sport-related—and mapped the seven LDA topics onto these themes. Each topic output includes the top 10 keywords and 30 most relevant terms. The keywords are representative words, reflecting the core content of the theme (Liang et al., 2024). Two co-authors independently reviewed the original bills based on the keywords, then classified the topics and discussed the labels. If disagreements arose, the third author was involved to reclassify and jointly discuss the theme labels until a consensus was reached.

Having identified themes, we explored the specific discursive strategies and ideological constructions employed in the bills. The identification of discursive strategies followed the same coding method as the theme labeling. Drawing on Wodak’s definition of topoi, the authors respectively revisited the bills through the 30 most relevant terms for each topic and identified the discursive strategies. The most relevant terms are a more refined list of words selected based on their correlation with specific keywords, which reflect the detailed context of the topic (Sievert and Shirley, 2014). Differences in identification were discussed until an agreement was reached. Then, we analyzed the similarities and differences across different periods based on the identified discursive strategies.

Analysis

Olympic-related discourse in Congress

We analyzed the number of Olympic-related bills and their party distribution in each session of Congress, as shown in Figure 3. The dashed line represents an exponential growth trend, indicating that although the number of bills fluctuated across sessions, the overall trend has been one of growth. This suggests that attention to Olympic-related issues in the U.S. Congress has gradually increased over the past several decades. Several peaks are observable, likely influenced by specific events, international developments, or shifts in domestic policy, which will be analyzed in the following sections. In the chart, the green bars represent Republican-proposed bills, while the orange bars represent Democratic-proposed bills. During the first period, Democratic-proposed bills outnumbered Republican ones; in the second period, Republican proposals surpassed Democratic ones; and in the third period, both parties showed nearly equal interest in Olympic-related issues.

Figure 3.

Olympic-related bills in 93rd–117th Congress.

The official website classified each bill by subject-policy area. Figure 4 shows the distribution percentage across various policy areas over time, with the horizontal axis represents policy areas and the vertical axis shows the percentage of bills. Sports and recreation holds the largest proportion overall, followed by international affairs and then economics and public finance. Given that the Olympics primarily aim to promote sports and cultural exchange, it is unsurprising that congressional discourse centers on sports and recreation. The focus on international affairs implies that, in the context of U.S. congressional discourse, the Olympics may be positioned not only as an athletic event but also as a site for political expression. Hosting the Olympics typically involves substantial financial investment and resource allocation. The emphasis on economics and public finance reflects Congress’s recognition of the significant economic impact and fiscal considerations associated with the Olympics.

Figure 4.

Subject-policy areas of Olympic-related bills.

Historically, Democrats and Republicans have clashed on issues such as climate change (Fiorino, 2022) and taxation (Perry and Braunstein, 2025). To see if similar divides emerge around the Olympics, we examined bills co-sponsored by both parties. A total of 371 bills were identified, accounting for more than half of all Olympic-related legislation and indicating a strong tendency toward bipartisan cooperation. A closer look at their policy domains (Figure 5) shows that, while sports accounts for the largest share, politics and its subfields (e.g. international affairs, government operations, national security) comprise more than half of all non-sports legislation, revealing a potential politicization of Olympic discourse. We then examined sponsors’ party affiliations in each chamber. In the House, Republicans introduced 233 bills versus 213 by Democrats; in the Senate, Republicans introduced 147 compared to 115 by Democrats. Republican majorities in both chambers align with prior findings that they favor symbolic appeals, invoking patriotism, moral rhetoric, and traditional values (Cayton and Dawkins, 2022). As a globally watched sporting and cultural spectacle, the Olympics provide a potent stage for such symbolic discourse, serving to signal positions, and reproduce ideology.

Figure 5.

Policy domains of bipartisan Olympic-related bills.

To further confirm the characteristics of Olympic-related discourse, we conducted a co-occurrence network analysis (see Figure 6). The node “olympic” serves as the central hub, closely connected to nodes such as “unitedstates”, “national”, “support” and “athlete”, indicating that Olympic-related discourse revolves around national interests, organizational management, and athlete support. The prominence of “unitedstates” as the most significant secondary node underscores the national orientation of Olympic legislative discourse, reflecting how lawmakers view the Olympics as a critical tool for constructing national identity and projecting policy objectives. Nodes like “committee” and “fund” illustrate the resource allocation and governance structures, with terms such as “authorize” highlighting the operational details of power dynamics, including authorizations for event organization, and athlete funding. Additionally, the presence of nodes like “athlete” and “paralympic” demonstrates the discourse’s emphasis on athlete welfare and inclusivity, aligning with social responsibilities such as supporting the participation of individuals with disabilities. Furthermore, nodes such as “international”, “china”, and “ioc” reveal that Olympic legislation extends beyond domestic concerns, closely tied to international cooperation and competition. The Olympics are thus framed not merely as a sports event but also as a platform for diplomatic messaging and advancing specific national interests.

Figure 6.

Co-occurrence network.

Analysis of themes and discursive strategies

Constructing Olympic discourse in the late 20th century

The late 20th century marked a transformative era for the Olympic Games, shaped by geopolitical tensions and the growing commercialization of global sports (Allison, 1986). As the Cold War intensified, the Olympics became both a stage for ideological confrontation and a platform for fostering international cooperation. Based on the topics generated by LDA and their associated keywords (see Table 1), three dominant themes that emerged in the Olympic-related bills during this period were international oversight and Cold War rivalry, athlete achievements and honorary commemorations, and event authorization and financial support.

Table 1.

Keywords of each topic in 93rd–102nd Congress.

Topic No.	Keywords
1	supervision, planning, relate, construction, soviet, commerce, team, aggression, summer, citizen
2	authorize, run, ground, torch, capitol, special, permit, relay, control, force
3	winter, congratulate, team, achievement, gratitude, performance, athlete, soccer, flag, anthem
4	withdraw, insulate, international, politics, permanent, troop, north, thorpe, medal, korea
5	coin, woman, secretary, authorizes, medal, athlete, atlanta, jim, thorpe, sale
6	compete, raise, concern, law, logistical, york, new, justification, coordinate, arrangement
7	united, committee, state, income, fund, site, international, tax, designate, summer

The first theme, international oversight and Cold War rivalry, encompasses topics 1, 4, and 6, which primarily address international relations and competition within the Cold War framework. Keywords such as “supervision”, “soviet”, and “aggression” reflected the U.S.-Soviet tensions. In this context, policymakers primarily employed the topos of danger and threat, which holds that actions or decisions with dangerous or harmful consequences should be avoided (Wodak, 2001). On the one hand, the Olympics were portrayed as an independent and just global symbol, with concerns that hosting the event in politically charged venues could jeopardize its fairness and purity (see Example 1). The emphasis on the need for the Olympics to remain free from international political influence reflected policymakers’ pursuit of sports equity. By advocating for depoliticization, they positioned the U.S. as an advocate for fairness and a protector in the international sphere, aiming to assume the role of a global guardian of the Olympic spirit and enhance its moral standing in global sports affairs. On the other hand, policymakers viewed the Olympics as a means to upholding justice. As illustrated in Example 2, politicians portrayed the Soviet Union as a threatening “Other” and sought to use the Olympics to safeguard the interests of the United States and its allies. By linking the waiver of the dual citizenship law to the question of Olympic participation, they deliberately introduced causal ambiguity, creating an illusion of moral coherence. This discursive strategy reframed what was essentially a politically motivated act of strategic containment as a morally justified decision, while simultaneously allowing the United States to present itself as a principled global leader rather than a Cold War adversary.

Example 1: Expresses the sense of the Congress that the International Olympic Committee should establish a permanent Olympic facility on a site that insulates the games from international politics.

Example 2: Calls upon the Soviet Union to waive application of a Soviet dual citizenship law with respect to citizens of the United States and Eastern Europe. Declares that the United States will not participate in the 1980 Summer Olympics, if adequate assurances are not received from the Soviets regarding such waiver.

The second theme, athlete achievements and honorary commemorations, includes topics 3 and 5, centering on the celebration and recognition of athletes’ achievements. This theme employed keywords such as “team”, “achievement”, “medal”, and “flag” to convey congratulations for athletes’ successes at the Olympics. The bills from this theme were primarily descriptive and lacked topos-based arguments. However, these seemingly neutral formulations exemplify a typical strategy of natural legitimation (Van Leeuwen, 2008). As shown in Example 3, policymakers represented “the American people” as a unified and homogeneous collective supporting the U.S. Olympic Team. In doing so, they transformed what might be a politically motivated stance (the promotion of nationalism) into an expression of universal national will. In Example 4, policymakers proposed the establishment of “United States Olympic Festival Day”, which was eventually enacted into law. As a form of ritualized collective memory, this initiative helped reinforce the Olympic spirit as a cultural symbol of national identity, fostering public loyalty, and a shared aspiration for national strength. The legislation was also designed to inspire and cultivate a new generation of American athletes, using the event to showcase the nation’s vitality and global standing.

Example 3: Expresses the sense of the Senate that the support, encouragement and best wishes of the American people accompany the U.S. Olympic Team to the 1980 Winter Olympic Games.

Example 4: Designates July 17, 1987, as United States Olympic Festival-1987 Day.

The third theme, event authorization and financial support, includes topics 2 and 7, focusing on Olympic funding, permits, and logistical support. Keywords like “authorize”, “funding”, “revenue”, and “taxes” reflected the operational needs of organizing the Olympics, like financial allocation, event authorization, and the management of resources and venues. This focus aligned closely with Congress’s legislative responsibilities (as seen in Example 5). The use of topoi under this theme centered on responsibility, which entails that those deemed accountable for a given issue are expected to take appropriate actions to address or resolve it (Wodak, 2001). As shown in Example 6, by allowing taxpayers the option to voluntarily contribute one dollar, Congress demonstrated that Olympic funding can be achieved through collective financial contributions, giving citizens an active role in supporting the Olympic cause. This strategy reflected individual responsibility toward national honor and interests and was framed the Olympics as a symbol of national unity and collective effort.

Example 5: Authorizes the 1984 Olympic torch relay to be run through the U.S. Capitol Grounds.

Example 6: Allow taxpayers to designate on their income tax returns a contribution of one dollar of their income tax refunds or any cash amount voluntarily forwarded with their returns to support the U.S. Olympic Trust Fund.

Shaping Olympic discourse across the turn of the 21st century

The turn of the 21st century ushered in a new phase for the Olympic movement, characterized by accelerated globalization, technological advancements, and growing concerns over security and sustainability (Grix and Houlihan, 2014). With the geopolitical reshuffling after the Cold War and the rise of digital media, the Olympics has gradually evolved into a dynamic platform that not only showcases human excellence and potential in sports but also addresses transnational challenges. The themes of Olympic-related bills during this period can be labeled as fiscal support and security assurance, sports management and authorization, and global involvement and interactions, according to the topics and keywords generated by LDA (see Table 2).

Table 2.

Keywords of each topic in 103rd–109th Congress.

Topic No.	Keywords
1	defense, world, assistance, appropriation, national, special, fund, coin, authorizes, secretary
2	agency, anti-doping, state, pan, american, sport, paralympic, recognize, congress, olympic
3	international, treatment, associated, personal, effect, article, special, grant, equipment, custom
4	run, torch, ground, capitol, greece, permit, government, relay, special, enter
5	unit, utah, earmark, department, relate, amount, winter, justice, counterterrorism, terrorism
6	communication, security, reimbursement, diplomatic, agent, account, foreign, operational, competition, require
7	Urge, hold, olympic, china, ioc, committee, successful, people, international, representative

The first theme includes topics 1, 3, 5, and 6. Unlike the first period, where fiscal support mainly focused on infrastructure and event organization, this period’s discourse placed a stronger emphasis on security assurance. Keywords such as “assistance”, “appropriation”, and “security” indicated this shift in fiscal support priorities. Under this theme, policymakers primarily drew on the topos of responsibility. The 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games were the first Olympic Games held after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In response to heightened security concerns, policymakers proposed increasing financial support (as seen in Example 7), as the United States Secret Service (USSS), under the Department of the Treasury, served as the lead agency for security operations (Office of the Press Secretary, 2002). It is noteworthy that when addressing the need to enhance Olympic security, policymakers did not mention the USSS but instead stated that the Department of Defense should provide support (as seen in Example 8). As Van Leeuwen (2008) explains, functionalization occurs when social actors are referred to in terms of what they do. By functionally representing the Department of Defense as responsible for security, policymakers constructed the Olympics from a sporting event into a politicized arena safeguarded by national sovereignty. Within this discourse, military involvement was legitimized as a rightful and necessary duty of the state. Moreover, the Department of Defense is a more familiar and publicly recognizable institution, which helps reinforce public trust in national security and promotes the image of the United States as one of the safest countries in the world.

Example 7: Makes supplemental appropriations for the Department of the Treasury for: (1) providing operational and perimeter security at the 2002 Winter Olympics. . .

Example 8: Expresses the sense of Congress that the Secretary should provide essential and appropriate public safety and security support for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The second theme, sports governance and authorization, covers topics 2, and 4. Keywords such as “congress”, “torch” and “permit” suggested the Congress’s authorization of the Olympic torch relay. Due to the U.S. hosting of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, related bills included permits and organizational work were proposed (see Example 9), reflecting Congress’s support and assistance in such activities. Additionally, keywords like “agency” and “anti-doping” revealed another prominent topic: anti-doping management. Established in 1999, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) conducted its first comprehensive athlete testing during the 2002 Winter Olympics. This resulted in the disqualification of several athletes from sports such as cross-country skiing and biathlon due to doping violations, marking a pivotal moment in Olympic anti-doping measures. Since then, full-scale anti-doping testing has been implemented. By using the topos of responsibility, policymakers expressed respect for international regulations and a commitment to combating doping (see Example 10). This discursive strategy underscored the United States’ sense of responsibility in global sports governance and its dedication to upholding the integrity of the Olympic Games.

Example 9: Authorizes the 2002 District of Columbia Special Olympics Law Enforcement Torch Run to be run through the Capitol grounds on June 7, 2002.

Example 10: Establish a research program for testing performance-enhancing substances the use of which is prohibited in the Olympic Games; provide peer review and assistance to the United States Anti-Doping Agency with respect to the laboratory accreditation process and testing procedures delineated in the International Olympic Committee’s Olympic Movement Anti-Doping Code; and establish a research program on the long-term consequences of the use of performance-enhancing substances.

Topic 7 is categorized as a distinct theme, labeled global involvement and interactions. Keywords like “urge”, “china”, “ioc”, and “people” reflected the intent of the U.S. Congress to express diplomatic concerns and assert positions within the Olympic context. In several bills, there was a clear emphasis that the 2008 Olympics should not be held in Beijing. These bills mainly utilized the topos of law and right, which asserts that actions should conform to formally established rules or codified norms (Wodak, 2001). As shown in Example 11, policymakers abstracted human rights violations as a breach of the “international human rights standards” and used the evaluative adjective “deplorable” to express condemnation, thus aligning political critique with Olympic values. Example 12 further illustrates this point. By appealing to impersonal authority, policymakers relocated the basis of legitimation from internal value judgments to legal norms. In this way, the Olympics were discursively recontextualized as a site for advocating political change.

Example 11: Expresses the sense of the House of Representatives that the 2008 Olympic Games should not be held in Beijing because the deplorable human rights record of the People’s Republic of China violates international human rights standards which that Government has pledged to uphold and its actions are inconsistent with the Olympic ideal.

Example 12: Expresses the view that the International Olympic Committee should not award the 2008 Olympics to Beijing unless the Government of the People’s Republic of China releases all political prisoners, ratifies the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), implements the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and observes internationally recognized human rights.

Formulating Olympic discourse in the early 21st century

The 21st century witnessed significant changes in Olympic priorities, influenced by unprecedented global challenges such as economic volatility and public health emergencies. During this period, Olympic-related discourse primarily focused on financial support, Olympic events and organization, diplomatic engagement and international relations, as indicated by the topics generated by LDA and their associated keywords (Table 3). Financial support remained a recurring focus across all three periods, though the emphasis shifted over time. In this period, the focus turned toward health assurance for vulnerable groups and athletes, with policymakers primarily utilizing the topos of responsibility. By highlighting the state’s health commitment and its support for anti-doping measures (see Example 13), policymakers constructed the United States as a responsible global actor. In fact, such discourse reduced health protection to doping management, thereby obscuring more complex structural issues and projecting American institutional superiority through sport. This topos was reflected not only in the implementation of anti-doping policies but also in its extension to young athletes, underscoring a long-term concern for the healthy development of the next generation (see Example 14). Additionally, bills under this theme addressed veterans (see Example 15), where policymakers supported veterans’ participation in the Olympics by offering financial assistance to ease the burdens of competition, providing them with renewed opportunities for social connection. Here, responsibility involved both physical rehabilitation support and the promotion of a sense of belonging and self-worth through athletic involvement.

Example 13: States that the United States is committed to ensuring the health of its Olympic, Pan American, and Paralympic athletes, and supports the strict adherence to antidoping in sports through testing, adjudication, education, and research.

Example 14: Authorizes appropriations for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) through FY2029; The bill also directs (1) USADA to promote a positive youth sport experience by providing educational materials on sportsmanship, character building, and healthy performance for those participating in youth sports. . .

Example 15: Permits the VA to provide a monthly assistance allowance to certain disabled veterans competing on U.S. Olympic teams.

Table 3.

Keywords of each topic in 110th–117th Congress.

Topic No.	Keywords
1	strict, testing, research, adjudication, adherence, education, health, pan, ensure, commit
2	special, olympics, activity, enforcement, game, authorizes, annual, capitol, world, goal
3	summer, site, game, chicago, greece, ideal, event, choose, committee, anniversary
4	personnel, boycott, resolution, coach, call, support, right, winter, minnesotan, southkorea
5	agency, income, usada, greece, official, american, pan, recognize, exclude, revenue
6	china, organization, international, resolution, taiwan, government, right, peng, human, ioc
7	team, compete, veteran, winter, usa, ideal, disabled, hold, game, committee

The second theme is Olympic events and organization, which includes topics 2 and 3. A review of the bills under this theme shows a primary focus on Olympic bids, commemorative activities and the transmission of values. Firstly, policymakers support the U.S. host for the Olympic Games (see Example 16) and actively express their recognition of the Olympic spirit (see Example 17), reflecting their desire to showcase the nation’s image and strength on the international stage. These bills do not delve into arguments but instead convey concern and calls to action. Notably, policymakers also employed the topos of responsibility to advocate for “American-made” products (see Example 18). Such discourse implicitly symbolized Olympic uniforms as material expressions of national loyalty and industrial vitality, and the Games were thus constructed as a site for bolstering nationalism.

Example 16: Expresses support for the ideals and values of the Olympic movement.

Example 17: Encourages the International Olympic Committee to select Chicago as the site of such Games.

Example 18: Urges the U.S. Olympic Committee to pledge to use American designers and manufacturers for Olympic uniforms in the future.

The third theme, diplomatic engagement and international relations, includes topics 4 and 6. During this period, the political undertones became increasingly apparent, and the use of topoi grew more diversified. For instance, policymakers drew on the topos of reality to enhance the perceived objectivity of their discourse, a strategy that justifies actions or decisions by appealing to existing conditions or facts (Wodak, 2001). As shown in Example 19, by foregrounding the US-South Korea alliance and South Korea’s exemplary conduct on the international stage, the Olympics were framed within a broader narrative of bilateral solidarity. Such discourse implicitly affirmed the United States’ superiority and authority in shaping the global order, reflecting the hegemonic ideology. Policymakers also made use of the topos of humanitarianism, which holds that actions should be consistent with humanitarian convictions (Wodak, 2001). In Example 20, they drew on the universal human values to legitimize opposition to China’s role as host. By framing “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” as violations of values such as “solidarity” and “nondiscrimination”, they actually blurred the line between legal accountability and Olympic ethics. Under the banner of moral concern, the Olympics were manipulated as a platform for ideological positioning and geopolitical exclusion.

Example 19: Reaffirms the steadfast alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea (South Korea). Applauds South Korea and its people for its significant contributions to the international community. Encourages South Korea to continue its foreign assistance programs. Provides best wishes and support for a successful Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in Pyeongchang in 2018.

Example 20: This resolution urges the International Olympic Committee to consider that the Olympic Charter’s principles of solidarity and nondiscrimination are hard to reconcile with holding the 2022 Winter Games in China, a country that the resolution states stands credibly accused of perpetuating crimes against humanity and genocide against ethnic and religious minorities.

Discussion and conclusion

Sport produces resources that can be leveraged for political purposes (Allison, 1986). By examining Olympic-related bills, the study reveals that these bills consistently carried underlying power and ideology, as the discourse is not just to reflect reality, but to advance the interests of actors (McNair, 2017). First, the themes of bills across all three periods align closely with contemporaneous socio-political contexts. In the first phase, shaped by Cold War geopolitics, legislation targets boycotts, and bolsters national pride and identity; in the second phase, driven by rapid globalization and emerging security threats, it emphasizes protective measures and strict adherence to international norms; and in the third phase, amid intensifying global competition and rising humanitarian concerns, it seeks to expand sports access for disadvantaged groups while promoting multilateral cooperation and care. Such alignment clearly shows that, in legislative discourse, the Olympics function not only as an event to advance athletic development but also as a means to respond to, influence, and shape broader political agendas.

Moreover, the discursive strategies and language used in these bills reveal how political actors utilized the Olympics to legitimize policy objectives. Legitimization is achieved through argumentation (Reyes, 2011), which provides justifications for certain behaviors and aims to secure support and approval. Drawing on Wodak’s (2001) classification of argumentation strategies, we identified the topoi employed by policymakers across different periods. Initially, the primary topoi were responsibility and danger and threat; then, responsibility and law and right; and finally, responsibility, law and right, reality, and humanitarian. Over time, the use of topoi became more diverse, and the tone shifted from direct confrontation to a more normative and moderate expression.

Specifically, responsibility emerges as a fundamental and recurring topos. By employing this discursive strategy, politicians emphasize the United States’ steadfast commitment to the Olympic movement and the international community, thereby providing an implicit moral justification for political actions and appealing to shared values to gain recognition. Furthermore, the notion of responsibility is connected with leadership, as greater capability is typically associated with greater responsibility (Beardsworth, 2015). The reverse also holds true, since bearing significant responsibility often signals strong capability. In this sense, the emphasis on responsibility functions as a rhetorical strategy to affirm the United States’ global leadership and its prominent role in international sporting affairs.

The application of the topos of danger and threat constructs a binary oppositional context, which simplifies complex geopolitical realities in a direct and forceful way. By portraying the situation in terms of justice versus injustice, it guides the audience to identify with the morally correct position, thus legitimizing the proposals as reasonable and principled responses. The topoi of law and right and reality add a layer of objectivity to the discourse. The former appeals to institutional authority such as legal norms to justify proposals, while the latter appeals to factual conditions and perceived circumstances to enhance rationality. However, this objectivity is largely a strategic presentation and may not reflect actual reality. By constructing the discourse as objective, policymakers lend moral authority to their proposals and conceal pre-existing value judgments. The topos of humanitarianism further amplifies this effect by mentioning universal values, especially human rights. By placing human rights above state sovereignty, such discourse expresses moral superiority as a pretext to justify political intervention.

It is important to note that a common feature shared by these discursive strategies is that they are rooted in moral values to mobilize public opinion and legitimize agendas, rather than purely technical or interest-based arguments. Research on moral framing has demonstrated its effectiveness as a persuasive tool, especially in political discourse (Atikcan and Hand, 2024; Barker, 2005). On the one hand, aligning messages with the audience’s moral beliefs can bridge ideological divides and enhance public acceptance and support (Feinberg and Willer, 2019). On the other hand, the moral values invoked often carry an assumed universality. Universality is a typical form of hegemony (Yin, 2007), which allows the dominant to impose their own values on the dominated while disallowing alternative moral perspectives (Asante, 1998). By harnessing seemingly universal moral ideas, policymakers construct themselves and their allies as the “positive us”, while casting their counterparts as the “negative others”. In this way, hegemonic discourse and hierarchical power structures are maintained and reinforced.

As one of the most influential sports mega-events, the Olympics have long been associated with universal values such as fairness, peace, solidarity, and human dignity. Building on this symbolic capital, politicians strategically link the Olympic movement with their political objectives to evoke public resonance and legitimize policy initiatives. Such practice operates within what Habermas (1975: 48) calls a “strategic-utilitarian morality”, which not only shapes the political meaning of the Games but also reinforces the United States’ moral claims and leadership status in international politics. Recognizing this underlying mechanism is crucial to understanding how and why the Olympics can serve as a communication tool in political discourse. In recent years, it has been widely believed that the Olympics are not only a venue for athletic competition but also a site of political communication (Dubinsky, 2024; Wang et al., 2024). Our study of congressional bills provides a key instance for such a perception, showing how agenda-setting and morally charged discursive strategies are used to leverage the Games for political communication.

To sum up, by combining CDA and text mining to analyze Olympic-related bills, this study contributes to understanding how the U.S. Congress conveyed underlying ideologies and political agendas within Olympic-related discourse and how it used the Olympics to shape its international standing and value system in the past five decades. This provides valuable insights and inspiration for future research on political communication related to the Olympics and other sporting events. Additionally, by incorporating methods such as LDA topic modeling and corpus-based analysis, we enriched the theoretical framework of DHA, enhancing our understanding of the complex process of political communication within Olympic-related discourse. The application of this framework can be extended to diverse sports and related materials.

However, it is important to acknowledge the limitations of this study. First, the data selection did not distinguish between bills that became law and those that did not, which may lead to an oversight of their divergent practical political impacts. Future research could conduct in-depth qualitative analyses of enacted bills, tracing the legislative process and evaluating their real-world effects. This would provide a more comprehensive understanding of how Olympic-related policies are discussed and formulated. Second, this study focuses exclusively on congressional bills and does not encompass other forms of congressional discourse, such as hearings and committee reports. Future research could broaden the scope to include these activities, which may reveal more nuanced rhetorical shifts, particularly during Olympic host or bid years. Third, this study concentrated on the use of argumentation strategies within discourse. Future research could explore other discursive construction strategies, further uncovering how narrators shape public perceptions through language. In addition, this study primarily focused on political texts from Congress. Future studies could examine the connections between political parties and bill sponsors, considering factors such as legislative collaboration networks and party politics to gain a more nuanced understanding of the Olympics’ role and influence.

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Doudou Lyu

Hongli Wang

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Philosophy and Social Science Foundation of China (grant number 22AGJ004).

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data availability statement

Data will be made available on request.

Author biographies

Doudou Lyu is a PhD student at the School of Foreign Studies, Xi’an Jiaotong University. Her research interests encompass political discourse, corpus-based discourse analysis, identity construction in discourse, and statistical modeling of discourse.

Hongli Wang is a Professor at the School of Foreign Studies, Xi’an Jiaotong University. Her research areas include corpus-based studies on public opinion and national image, critical discourse analysis, and international political linguistics.

Linlin Liang is a PhD student at the School of Foreign Studies, Xi’an Jiaotong University. Her research interests include gender studies, national image, discourse analysis, and international relations.

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