From Seasoned Vet to Space-Taker: Gendered Ageism in Coverage of Professional Basketball Player Diana Taurasi’s Final Season

Abstract

This study examined coverage of 42-year-old professional basketball player Diana Taurasi during her final WNBA season. Age remains an underexplored element of identity in sports media research. An analysis informed by intersectionality found that media discourse made age meaningful through gendered norms of athletic value, constructing Taurasi through narratives of both exceptionalism and decline. This was produced through portrayals of Taurasi as both past her prime and as resisting ageing through bodily discipline. It also observed how some coverage amplified social media discourse of intergenerational rivalry and logics of succession, casting Taurasi and older players as jealous and as taking opportunities from incoming star players. This paper situates this coverage within the context of a league where Black and/or LGBTQIA women have traditionally excelled but have also been marginalised by discourses shaped by racism, misogyny and homophobia. It also argues for further research that considers how some sports storytelling practices might contribute to online harm, in this case by perpetuating misogynistic and racist commentary that surged alongside increased WNBA viewership in 2024. The study’s findings also underscore the need for intersectional approaches that consider age in feminist sports media analysis.

Keywords

media basketball intersectionality WNBA ageism

Introduction

In 2024, during a press conference at the Paris Olympic Games, 42-year-old basketball player Diana Taurasi told journalists that she found constant questions about retirement “a bit disrespectful” (Merrell, 2024, para. 7). She also pointed out the gendered aspect of the media coverage by adding: “only a woman would have 20 years of experience and it’s an Achilles heel instead of something that is treasured” (para. 9). The following year, before the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) season opened, Taurasi did announce her retirement. This ended a professional career in which she’d been part of three championship teams, was the league’s all-time scoring leader and won a record six Olympic gold medals with Team USA. Media coverage often cast her as the GOAT of women’s basketball (WNBA, 2021) as well as a loveable villain known for being highly competitive, trash-talking on court, and gaining record technical fouls (Baccellieri, 2024). She was also one of few players who had attained domestic celebrity beyond the WNBA. At 5 years older than the second-oldest player in the WNBA at the time, she had played well beyond league retirement norms. In 2025, only seven of the league’s 156 players were over 35 (Thurston, 2025), and only one played a regular starting role on their team. WNBA players’ performance prime is typically between 23—most domestic athletes’ second year in the league post-collegiate career—and 29, peaking at 28 (Pradhan & Mangan, 2024). Before Taurasi only a couple of players had played beyond age 40.

This study analyses coverage of Taurasi during her final year of play, 2024, one that saw the league finalise a record new US$200 million television rights deal (Feinberg, 2024a), attract record-breaking live spectatorship, and experience increased social media engagement (WNBA, 2024). This boom in attention was spurred by a group of draftees who’d gained fame during their college careers and who now entered the league among the top draft picks (Darvin, 2024). Incoming athletes like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and Cameron Brink ignited excitement over a new generation of youthful talent who would “take over” the WNBA. Reese, a national champion with LSU, was ranked second in highest NIL earnings among NCAA athletes in her final year of college (Yahoo Sport, 2024). Clark, a point guard whose prodigious shooting talents saw her break the all-time NCAA shooting record and carry her college team to multiple National Championship finals, would already enter the league as one of the most recognised athletes in women’s basketball. Emerging online discourse forecast that these young players would transform an unpopular league into a product worthy of attention, with Clark at its centre. The league saw a significant increase in the volume of media coverage, and the diversity of media outlets covering it—especially those reporting on Clark (Gaillot & Tarasova, 2024). This spectacular rise in attention to the league was also accompanied by escalated online vitriol, including racist, homophobic and misogynist discourse. Several players spoke out about online bullying and threats (Lutz, 2024). The WNBA was criticised for failing to take concerns about online abuse seriously (Associated Press, 2024) and media were also criticised for contributing to narratives that reinforced racist stereotypes (Yanity, 2024) and misogyny (Gold, 2024; Jones, 2024). Taurasi was particularly subjected to media attention in 2024 due to her selection to a record sixth US women’s Olympic basketball team, the speculation over whether it would be her last WNBA season, and media and fan discourse entangling her in an intergenerational rivalry with Clark. This was sparked by some highly reproduced comments Taurasi made about challenges incoming rookies would face entering the league, as well as the marked similarities between the two players’ games. Their shared talent for long-range shooting, prolific scoring and stellar college basketball careers saw media narratives cast Taurasi as soon-to-retire GOAT and Clark as her likely successor.

Age is a significantly understudied factor in sports media scholarship (Atkinson, 2009), despite holding unique and sometimes contradictory meanings. Sports journalism, preoccupied with records and extremes of human ability, routinely attends to and celebrates athletes who break perceived physical—and age—barriers. Concurrently, discourses of age can be shaped by a preoccupation with physical deterioration, with a hyperfocus on “peak” performance and the impact of ageing on older athletes. Older athletes can be subject to ageist commentary (Atkinson & Herro, 2010), even while celebrated for breaking age records (Allain & Dotto, 2024). What constitutes “peak” and “aged” is often younger than in many career domains and is highly specific to each sport. Gender and age can also mutually constitute one another. As Crenshaw (1989) argues, intersectionality assumes that social domains such as race, gender, class, age and sexuality cannot be examined as isolated factors in social life, but rather as concatenating. While generous scholarly attention has been paid to how attitudes to gender, race and class have shaped the construction of sportswomen by sports media discourse, less has addressed how gender and age might entwine and manifest. Thus, the aim of this project was to contribute further to limited existing scholarly analysis of how attitudes to extremes of age in professional and elite levels of women’s sports are understood through an intersectional lens.

Intersectionality

Civil rights advocate and critical race scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) is widely cited as introducing the term “intersectionality” as a metaphor to describe how multiple and often overlapping forms of marginalisation can compound. While Black feminist scholars have traced the origins of analysis of the complex and relational nature of structures of oppression to much earlier Black feminist work, Jennifer Nash (2019) has argued that the historical “turn” in intersectionality studies gives unnecessary primacy to searching for its “true” form, rather than focusing on the rich affordances of intersectional thinking in the work of Black women and women of colour over time (2019). Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (2015) sought to further define intersectionality by reviewing the broad swathe of existing studies and disciplines that had so far laid claim to it. So broad was its scholarly application, Collins could only identify a consensus that intersectionality typically observes race, class, age, gender, and sexuality as “reciprocally shaping phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities” (2015, p.2). For Crenshaw, intersectionality is neither theory nor method, but rather a lens through which we can observe how power “comes and collides, interlocks and intersects” (Columbia Law School, 2017). Collins, attempting to resolve the “definitional dilemmas” wrought by this sprawling body of scholarship, landed on a “knowledge project” with great capacity for “attentiveness to power relations and social inequalities” (2015, p.1). While some have critiqued intersectionality’s easy “analytic import” into a range of disciplines, Nash has attributed this mobility to its ability to “neatly and coherently” describe the kind of complexity scholars routinely grapple with (2019, p.11).

The focus of this study is the media construction of Diana Taurasi, a 42-year-old lesbian, Latina, female athlete. This offers rich potential for a feminist analysis informed by intersectionality. Tredway’s (2019) analysis of how Black tennis player Serena Williams fit within the historically white, upper-class world of tennis emphasises the need for specificity in considering the political and cultural moment in which the athlete exists against the sport’s historical backdrop. Taurasi has also been an enduring superstar of a league which, in the most recent data located, comprises 74% Black or African American players (Lapchick, 2021), and 30% out LGBTQIA players (Maskell, 2024). The Women’s National Basketball Association, the longest-running women’s professional team sports league, is fruit of Title IX amendments to the Equal Pay Act, which increased opportunity across many sports for female athletes from the 1970s onwards. Basketball programs proliferated across college campuses in the United States, leading to the emergence of women’s professional leagues from the late seventies. Beginning in 1996, the WNBA was financially backed by the substantial economic and cultural power of the NBA (McDonald, 2000) and was initially marketed to a white, heterosexual fan base (Yanity, 2024). Its players have experienced substandard wages and conditions and were also encouraged to emphasise their femininity to appeal to broader markets (Munro-Cook, 2024). Taurasi, known for her “signature, swashbuckling swagger” (Baccellieri, 2024) and non-traditionally feminine attire, was initially subject to marginalising media discourse and marketing that has privileged those early stars who the WNBA could market as the “heterosexual ‘girl next door’” (Munro-Cook, 2024, p. 93). In a recent biographical documentary series, Taurasi attests to being conscripted into a feminine presentation in her early WNBA years (Wyn, 2025). This can also erase race, such as the case of former WNBA player Rebecca Lobo, who, despite having Cuban roots, Munro-Cook notes, was used in marketing and media to portray a valued brand of culturally white femininity (Munro-Cook, 2024).

The WNBA also sits against the historic backdrop of women’s sport more generally, where lesbian identity and muscular bodies have been rendered aberrant, and Black athletes’ sporting talents have been ascribed to instinct and physicality, rather than intelligence and strategy. Over time, many WNBA players have resisted the cultural hegemony of women’s sport by speaking out about equal pay, by embodying masculine or non-traditionally feminine styles, by openly acknowledging their queer identities, and by campaigning for human rights. Isard and Melton’s (2022) study found that despite their dominance, Black WNBA players received significantly less media attention, and those who did not present as traditionally feminine received the least. Intersectionality helps account for the complexity of understanding representation of Taurasi within the backdrop of a sport where black women have traditionally excelled, while also being marginalised by discourses shaped by racism, misogyny and homophobia. Taurasi has been subject to forms of marginalisation as a non-feminine presenting, Latina lesbian, yet she may have been afforded more attention—and therefore, opportunity—compared to her Black colleagues.

Examining age and gender in concert is vital, because, as Tortajada et al. (2018, p. 2) argue, images of ageing bodies are negotiated in terms of gender, and they “structure each other in a complex, back-and-forth feedback loop” (2018, p. 2). Feminist sports media scholarship has taken an intersectional lens—particularly to the intersection of gender and race—to produce rich accounts of sports media coverage of women athletes (Litchfield et al., 2018; Tredway, 2019). However, age has rarely been considered. If, as Collins argues, intersectionality’s greatest purpose is its “attentiveness to power relations” (2019, p. 5), it is a vital lens to scrutinise how meanings might be deployed or perpetuated via mainstream sports media, which is a powerful constitutive entity.

Age, Ageing and Sport

Ageism can manifest in a range of ways. It can be expressed via structural ageism, such as the imposition of upper and lower age limitations in specific Olympic sports. It also manifests in cultural expressions of age-related prejudice (McCarthy, 2024c). Athletes can be subject to ageism earlier in life, due to the connection between age and physical decline in sport, and it can be magnified at the axes of gender and age. Studies examining attitudes to and construction of age within sport have often been restricted to examining its impact on recreational participation. For example, significant sociological research has attended to how perceptions about age have created barriers to older people’s sports participation and experiences (Jin & Harvey, 2021; Wheaton, 2017). In 2009, acknowledging an increasingly obvious gap in sport communication research, Atkinson urged communications and media scholars to scrutinise the constitution of age in sports media more “thoughtfully, wholeheartedly and appropriately” (2009, p.1). Since then, Allain and Dotto (2024) have drawn attention to how media representations of age can construct the limits and possibilities of sport, while Oghene et al. (2015) reported contradictory narratives around physical deterioration and resisting ageing in news media constructions of “ageing bodies” among recreational and Masters athletes. Allain and Barrick found that, despite curling’s history of venerating older bodies, a recent “dearth” of coverage of older curlers in popular media coincided with a significant, emerging youth participant demographic (2024, p. 10).

Several case studies have found that professional athletes who exceed age expectations by either peaking early or resisting retirement expectations by staying in a sport longer are routinely seen as defying a sport’s age order. In their study of media representations of tennis player Andre Agassi over time, Atkinson and Herro (2010) found that age references were most common in the early and late stages of Agassi’s career, when he was perceived as “too young” or “too old” for the game, and that they frequently carried judgement and stereotypes associated with ageism. In a study of narratives around Lance Armstrong and Roger Federer’s late careers, Tulle noted (2016) how age is frequently produced as a “biomarker of decline” (253), even as male athletes’ longevity is celebrated. This can be intensified at the axes of gender. Another point of scholarly focus has been sports and athletes where younger athletes have become the norm at the professional and elite levels, particularly in women’s divisions of sports like figure skating, artistic gymnastics, and skateboarding (McCarthy, 2024b). Media has also frequently depicted older athletes as outliers and aberrations (Allain & Dotto, 2024; Carmack & Lazenby, 2024; McCarthy, 2024a). Carmack and Lazenby’s (2024) study of media coverage of 25-year-old figure skater Mariah Bell’s win at the 2022 US National Figure Skating Championships found that media placed an undue focus on Bell’s age, and observed frames related to ageing, age as a restriction and appropriate ages for participation in the sport.

This study makes an effort to address what Atkinson described in 2009 as the “neglect of age” in sports communication research. Meanwhile, it also offers an examination of coverage of an understudied identity within existing scholarship: the “ageing” professional sportswoman. It situates discourse about her within the context of sport, but also within the wider popular cultural representations of women.

Sport Media, Age and News Values

As Entman (1993) argued, media play an important framing function for audiences, shaping how they think about social categories, including how emphasis may be placed on some attributes over others. Framing of age suggests dominant cultural interpretations of what constitutes young and old, peak and ageing when it comes to sport. Sports journalism can thus naturalise ideas about age as limitation, opportunity, and even spectacle. This can then shape audience understanding of, or attitude to, elements of coverage such as identity. Mainstream media still plays a significant agenda-setting role by constituting what is newsworthy in sporting domains. Like sport itself, sports news has an imperative to entertain as much as inform, contributing to its lingering status as the “toy department of journalism” (Rowe, 2007). In their study of the journalistic principles of sport reporting, Horky et al. highlight the uniquely symbiotic nature of sport and media (Horky et al., 2024). They describe how sports journalism “takes place in a world it has created, through staging, dramatic highlights, crises, success and failures” and the “self-dramatization of sport and its dramatization through media go hand in hand” (2024, p. 259). They identify three characteristics that shape modern sports journalism (2024):

(1) Entwinement with other areas of society, such as economics and politics.

(2) A reliance on analysis, background, and context of sport to give broad and rich coverage to events that audiences can already witness themselves.

(3) The production of celebrity, which gives scope for copious soft news coverage about athletes’ lives.

Tonally, sports reporting is marked by more descriptive prose than standard news reporting. Additionally, the lines between what constitutes news, shaped by neutrality, and sports analysis, which is far more subjective, are less clear. This can partly be attributed to the fact that sports journalists work certain sports beats and often come to be seen as experts in the sport itself and thus are granted a form of credibility and heightened status that blurs traditional boundaries. This may result in a lack of clarity over whether they are reporters or supporters (English, 2017). While newsworthiness criteria such as timeliness, proximity and significance of an event to the intended audience will frequently determine its primacy in hard news (Conley & Lamble, 2006), in sport others can hold high value. Stories of conflict hold strong appeal in rivalry narratives between teams and/or individual athletes and can focus on peripheral and interpersonal drama. The prominence or celebrity of an athlete and their recognition beyond their sport can determine the amount and breadth of coverage. The unusual can also determine news value in a cycle of news reporting, where wins and losses are part of the routine enactment of sport. Sports media seek interesting circumstances by which a result was achieved, such as broken records, adverse conditions, and extremes of performance.

Athlete age constitutes part of sports informational storytelling conventions. It is often used to replace athletes’ names to avoid repetition and add detail (e.g. “the 24-year-old point guard”). Age also operates as a signifier of career stage and performance relative to the sport covered. Fans and sport audiences may understand, for example, that a 27-year-old centre in the WNBA is a player at her peak, while a 27-year-old female figure skater may be defying age norms. Sports journalism is record-driven, and favours stories spurred by extremes such as the biggest win/loss margins, “first ever” stories and GOAT debates. Age is often employed due to a narrative tendency towards superlatives, valuing “oldest ever” and “youngest ever” achievement narratives. Reporters are more likely to mention the age of athletes at either end of the age spectrum (Atkinson & Herro, 2010) or when their age is considered an aberration in a sport’s age order (Allain & Dotto, 2024). Athletes defying age norms often attract coverage simply for participating in their sport (McCarthy, 2024b).

Sports media scholarship has rarely attended to chronology and age in media analyses of athletes’ careers, despite how routinely age is discussed within the sports journalism genre (Atkinson, 2009) and the fact it is often imbued with judgement (Atkinson & Herro, 2010). This study helps to redress this scarcity by examining “specific modalities of cultural ageing” (Tulle, 2016, p. 261) in how contemporary sports journalism constructs a female athlete considered to be “ageing” in her sport.

Method

To undertake this study, text-based articles mentioning Diana Taurasi during 2024 were identified. Text-based articles generate data from easily traceable and stable sources. As the project is concerned with journalistic discourse, text-based sports coverage is also most relevant due to its specific, routinised conventions, which allow observation of linguistic choices, quote selection, ranking of information based on notions of importance. Text-based journalism remains an agenda-setting backbone of sports media coverage (Horky et al., 2024), with both legacy newsrooms and newer platforms devoting significant resources to in-depth reportage to complement broadcast coverage. To be included in the sample, Taurasi had to be the topic of at least one sentence (as opposed to being mentioned in passing, or as part of a list of names). To capture the full breadth of coverage in an Olympic year, articles were located using both Google and Google News searches to collect stories from traditional news outlets with online platforms as well as web-based outlets that regularly report women’s basketball. As discussed in the introduction, given the rise in popularity of the WNBA due to the incoming youth talent (particularly Caitlin Clark), as well as being an Olympic year, a wide range of outlets covered the WNBA in 2024. The sample includes long-established media outlets that routinely produce sports content like Associated Press, New York Times/The Athletic, Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, and Phoenix New Times. The sample also includes content from long-established online sports platforms like ESPN, as well as other non-legacy sports platforms that have proliferated in the web 2.0 era like Athlon Sports, Bleacher Report and The Spun. These feature traditional sports reporting, as well content focusing on tabloid elements like athletes’ personal lives, conflict and rumour, and have a heavy social media presence. Legacy and traditional tabloids like USA Today and ‘red top’ tabloids, known for their sensationalist content, like The Daily Mail (UK) and The Mirror (US) also began writing about the WNBA—particularly stories related to Caitlin Clark. A few outliers that also do not typically cover women’s basketball appeared as part of Taurasi’s brand deal with an eczema treatment product (during National Eczema Week) including Forbes, Uproxx, and magazines like Parents and GQ.

Of the 189 articles collected, 73 constituted general reporting of the WNBA season, and 65 covered the Paris Olympic basketball competition. Taurasi was already one of the most well-known members of the Olympic basketball team. Her selection to a sixth Olympics made her a frequent focus of coverage by sports media outlets that regularly report women’s basketball as well as those picking it up in an Olympic year. The sample included 27 profiles and Q&A features and 16 opinion pieces. Such was the entanglement of Diana Taurasi with rookie Caitlin Clark that 20 articles mentioning Taurasi were about Clark, and 36 overall contained angles focused on the relationship between them. Where an article was a piece of commentary or op-ed, it is noted in the analysis and discussion. Additionally, some platforms have developed a convention of embedding fan social media posts into articles as quotes. Instances of this are also noted in the analysis.

Analysis was undertaken using Braun and Clarke’s (2022) reflexive thematic analysis approach, involving two rounds of coding followed by the generation of themes. Articles were first imported into the qualitative analysis software NVivo, where they were read through twice and then categorised by article type and by the focus. Following these steps, all mentions of age were highlighted in the articles for coding. Open coding was performed inductively, informed by an intersectional feminist approach, identifying and coding references to age. Paragraphs, sentences and descriptors (as well as entire articles) were treated as units. The coding process was repeated twice. Following this process, a set of themes related to Taurasi’s age were identified and named.

The following sections relate six dominant themes that emerged in the way Taurasi’s age was constituted, providing referenced examples from the articles collected.

Themes

Age-Defying Veteran

Many stories framed Taurasi as defying the age order of women’s professional basketball, expressed through routine mentions of her being the oldest in the league/Olympic team or for breaking new WNBA/Olympic age records. She was also framed as defying physical expectations of ageing. For example, a Yahoo Sports profile published during the Olympic Games described her as having “outlasted everyone she played in her early career” (Negley, 2024, para. 23). Sports content provider Field Level Media prefaced her stat line in a match report with “She did not show her age in Phoenix’s season opening 89-90 road loss” Field Level Media (2024). In Olympic coverage, the San Francisco Chronicle claimed the Olympic team’s “distinctive advantage” was “ageless Diana Taurasi” (Kroichick, 2024, para. 2). Many profile articles also questioned Taurasi on or assumed her extraordinary efforts to maintain her physical fitness. A Hartford Courant profile said the “veteran’s unmatched longevity doesn’t involve a secret formula or fountain of youth” (Adams, 2024, para. 1), followed by a quote from Taurasi about the hard physical work it takes to maintain physical fitness. A New York Times profile described her “longer” and “more focused” daily effort to be match-ready (Jennings, 2024, para. 8).

The term veteran was frequently deployed as a descriptor. While “veteran” and “rookie” are used as classifications in player contracts and bargaining agreements, both derive from military terms. Veteran is frequently used in sports media narratives to connote hard-won age and experience and was used to describe Taurasi as battle-tested in 40 of the articles. For example, a USA Today article called ‘Fighting Father Time’ discussing Taurasi’s and Lebron James’ value to their respective Olympic basketball teams described them as “some of the most seasoned veterans at these games” (Schnell, 2024, para. 2). It functioned at times as both a noun/descriptor (e.g. the “grizzled Olympic veteran”) or as an adjective (e.g. the “veteran guard”).

Fading GOAT

While coverage often referred to Taurasi as being among the greatest women’s basketball players, and 37 articles referred to her as a “legend” in the sport, coverage also framed her as past her prime. At times, her comparatively less competitive 2024 stat line was not considered a possible temporary lull as it might be for a younger athlete, but a sign of the inevitable decline that comes with age. For example, an Athlon Sports analysis of the Olympic team selection described her as “not as fast as she was in 2004” (Leite, 2024, para. 4). A Phoenix New Times article emphasised this decline, placing her past and recent performances in contrast by describing her as “the league’s all-time scoring leader” and the inspiration for the WNBA logo” while also saying “keeping pace is a challenge at her age” (Kleen, 2024, para. 15), and that she is in the “waning days of her prime” (para. 2). In others, it was inferred without reference to her past success, like a New York Times analysis of likely starters within the Olympic team that expressed surprise that “despite her age”—which was connected with a slower pace of play—Taurasi could be considered a possible starter and “lynchpin” of the US Olympic team (Merchant & Pickman, 2024, para. 9).

Coverage also showed a preoccupation with her retirement from the WNBA. While Taurasi herself had not announced anything (although she did confirm Paris would be her last Olympics), many stories assumed or speculated that 2024 was her last WNBA season. For example, a Forbes journalist wrote, ‘While it’s not written in stone that Taurasi will retire once playoffs conclude, it feels extremely likely’ (Young, 2024, para. 2). A Post and Courier article referred to the press asking Taurasi, “how she will know when it’s time to retire” (Achenbach, 2024, para. 3). As noted in the introduction, Taurasi herself spoke about how often she encountered questions about when she would retire (Merrell, 2024). Her team, the Phoenix Mercury, also played into this by launching a pre-emptive social media campaign celebrating Taurasi’s contribution to basketball that echoed this assumption, called “If this is it…” late in 2024 (Young, 2024).

Space-Taker

Some outlets that publish more sensationalist, tabloid content framed the selection of Taurasi and other older players to the Olympic team as occurring at the cost of younger players. These stories typically assumed Taurasi’s selection to the team to be the result of a simple choice between Taurasi and Clark. This space-taking sentiment was predominantly expressed by reporting some Clark fans’ social media sentiments and by opinion writers invested in building arguments for the rookie’s inclusion on the team. An Azcentral op-ed framed Taurasi’s selection as being “at the expense of Caitlin Clark” (Moore, 2024, para. 2). A USA Today opinion piece criticising Clark’s omission from the US Olympic team made a number of performance comparisons to selected members, including stats from both Taurasi’s current and peak performances (Brennan, 2024). A Daily Mail article described Clark’s Olympics exclusion as a “snub” (Winters, 2024, para. 1) and that the coach and selection committee “favour” veterans (para. 3). Platforms like Athlon Sports particularly contributed to this discourse by publishing stories based on fan criticism. One reported that “Much has been made about the 41-year-old Taurasi making the squad over the young and talented Clark”, quoting a fan’s X post dismissing Taurasi as one of the “old farts” of the league (Arend, 2024, para. 16). Another described Taurasi’s selection as “controversial” (Escarpio, 2024a, para. 2) and quoted a fan saying she’d “stolen” Clark’s team spot (para. 3). US financial magazine Barron’s also cited fan suggestions that Taurasi “should have made way for a younger player” (Bryan, 2024, para. 12).

Jealous Vet

Some tabloids and more sensationalist reporting created/perpetuated a rivalry between Taurasi and Clark, one that echoed wider media and social media narratives throughout 2024 that some older WNBA players were jealous of the incoming rookie class, and particularly of Clark. Taurasi was particularly targeted due to repeated reproduction of quotes from an interview. ESPN presenter Scott Van Pelt asked Taurasi what the incoming draft class would experience entering a professional league. For clarity purposes, here is the entire exchange:

Scott Van Pelt: “Kamila’s coming, Caitlin’s coming, there’s more than just that that’s coming. What will the league have in store for them when they get there?”

Diana Taurasi: Look, SVP. Reality is coming. There’s levels to this thing. And that’s just life. We all went through it. You see it on the NBA side, and you’re going to see it on this side. You look superhuman playing against 18-year-olds, but you’re going to come with some grown women that have been playing professional basketball for a long time. Not saying that it’s not going to translate, because when you’re great at what you do, you’re just going to get better. But there is going to be a transition period, where you’re just going to have to give yourself grace as a rookie, and it might take a little bit longer for some people.” (Gifdsports, 2024).

Taurasi’s response was frequently cut to the first sentence or two, or even just to the grab “reality is coming” and often reported as a response to a question specifically about Clark. Of the sample, 35 articles referenced the phrase “reality is coming”, and only one referenced the entire quote. The Daily Mail cited the quote as an example in an article reporting a golf influencer’s social media claim that Clark was subject to “hate” from the rest of the league (Salt, 2024). A SportingNews columnist used it in an article that purported to be an explainer of Taurasi and Clark's “beef” (Dozier, 2024). A similar USA Today explainer described Taurasi as having taken “a few shots” at the rookie, which included this comment (Sykes, 2024, para. 6). The rivalry narrative was often framed as intergenerational, and matchups between the two athletes’ teams described via metaphors like “Rookie versus The Goat” in the New York Times (Deltsch, 2024, para. 1) and “old guard vs. young lion blood feud” in Azcentral coverage (Moore, 2024, para. 2). Like the space-taker narratives, tabloid outlets contributed significantly to rivalry narratives by platforming fan sentiments through embedded social media quotes. An Athlon Sports article quoted a fan describing her as a “petty, jealous” co-worker (Guinhawa, 2024, para. 7). The social media accounts for both Clark’s and Taurasi’s teams also made jokes based on “reality is coming” in their marketing of matchups between the pair.

Ageism

Ageism arose as a theme predominantly in the Olympic coverage, almost entirely via repeated reproductions of the quote from an Olympic press conference (quoted in introduction), where Taurasi described the relentless press questions about whether she would retire as ageist, but also sexist as they weren’t typically posed to male players of a similar age (Merrell, 2024). Some articles framed the quote as an individual grievance. An Associated Press Olympic article compared the attitudes of Taurasi and fellow basketball player Lauren Jackson, who was playing on the Australian team at 43, by opening an article with “Diana Taurasi wishes people would stop talking about her age. Lauren Jackson just admits it—she’s old” (Feinberg, 2024b, para. 1). Meanwhile, others nodded to a wider cultural issue. Athlon Sports described her as having “started the conversation” about ageism (Escarpio, 2024b). Only a USA Today Olympic article discussed Taurasi’s reference to the gendered element of the ageism, saying “It’s not lost on her that while she fields endless questions about when she’ll finally hang up her sneakers, [LeBron] James’ longevity is often admired” (Schell, 2024, para. 5). One profile Q&A, published on online culture platform Uproxx before the Olympics, foregrounded ageism as a common experience for a sportswoman of Taurasi’s age by asking several questions about if and how Taurasi had encountered it (Armstrong, 2024).

Mentor

Meanings around Taurasi’s veteran status also manifested notably in coverage of her selection to the US Olympic basketball team. Those affirming or discussing her selection placed significant value on her role as a mentor and guide for younger players—often more than her performance potential. In an Olympic report, the San Francisco Chronicle mentioned her “modest numbers” but described her as a “priceless resource” for Olympic rookies, but also for the coaches, with her “uncommon knowledge” of opposing teams (Kroichick, 2024, para. 8). Another quoted coach Cheryl Reeves describing Taurasi’s value to the Olympic team as her “incredible and invaluable” voice and experience (ESPN, 2024). In describing Taurasi’s efforts to maintain her physical fitness at her age, a New York Times profile described the work as a “sacrifice” she made “to be here, not just for herself but for her teammates” (Jennings, 2024, para. 8). Many articles reporting the Olympic team selection quoted fellow athletes and coaches speaking to her value in a support role rather than to her physical contribution to the team. Conversely, one Athlon Sports article that cited fan criticism of Taurasi after Clark was not selected to the Olympic team quoted a fan chiding Taurasi for being petty rather than taking Clark “under her wing” (Guinhawa, 2024, para. 6).

Discussion

Age mentions in sports coverage are rarely purely informational but loaded with complex meaning that can simultaneously celebrate and diminish athletes’ achievements (Atkinson, 2009). Media framing naturalises dominant sentiments, playing a significant role in how audiences might interpret meaning (Entman, 1993). Birrell and McDonald (2000) argue that structures of dominance cannot be understood in isolation from each other, because they “operate in historically specific ways with identifiable consequences”. Applying an intersectional lens illuminates how age is not simply an additive attribute in the coverage but works to co-produce the subject position of the older sportswoman. Taurasi’s age is rendered meaningful through the production of gendered norms of athletic value which are legitimised only under specific conditions. The older sportswoman’s presence must be either justified, domesticated or displaced. Intersectionality also allows us to attend to how depictions of sportswomen perceived as ageing can reveal a highly “gendered ageism” (Tortajada et al., 2018), while also attending to how other aspects of Taurasi’s identity have both privileged her and villainised her.

In their construction of Taurasi, coverage relied on simultaneous narratives of exceptionalism and decline, legacy and succession, rivalry and care. This manufactured a gendered age order in women’s professional basketball, one where the older sportswoman is celebrated for transcending age yet contained when she embodies it. Media often contribute to the “unmaking” of elite sports careers via undue focus on physical decline and timelines to retirement (Tulle, 2016, p. 251). The coverage not only situated women’s professional sporting window as precarious but frequently reiterated a pre-scripted endpoint. Even when ageism is acknowledged, it preserves a narrative where women’s careers are naturally shorter. Existing research shows how media rituals pre-write the ending for athletes (Atkinson & Herro, 2010; Tulle, 2016). However, the comparative silence or celebration around male basketball players’ longevity, as observed by Taurasi and Schnell (2024), exposes differing attitudes to acceptable career timelines.

The ‘fading goat’ trope converted Taurasi’s current performances into a pre-retirement narrative, archiving her even as she continues to play. However, being an older athlete does confer Taurasi with certain benefits, producing her experience as an irreplaceable asset. Her longevity is a source of legitimacy that allows her to inhabit roles unavailable to younger players like mentor and as carrier of culture, re-centring her importance even as her physical prime is questioned.

Repeated frames of mentorship ascribe value to the older sportswoman. They do so by reassign athletic value to care labour via her capacity for mentorship and contribution to team culture, redeeming her fading GOAT status through another form of serviceability. Coverage located her value in the non-athletic values of “experience, stability and emotional maturity” associated with older female athletes (Carmack & Lazenby, 2024, p. 756). This reflects patterns of ageing discourse where older women are legitimated through support rather than action, a type of symbolic containment (Gulette, 2004).

The ‘ageless veteran’ frame manifested a postfeminist exceptionalism whereby the older sportswoman’s success is hinges on rigorous self-discipline, moralising her legitimacy in ways that are absent from comporable case studies of ageing male athletes. This reinforces gendered ideologies that posit overcoming age and related physical deterioration as a significant personal responsibility (Hodler & Lucas-Carr, 2016).

The ‘space-taker’ and ‘jealous vet’ narratives produced by some of the more sensationalist and fan-based reporting relied on a logic of succession whereby the older sportswoman naturally makes way for the younger. Taurasi’s continued presence is posed as “blocking” the younger generation from inheriting what is rightfully theirs. It produces decisions (such as Taurasi’s selection to the Olympic team) as individual rather than structural, and her age as a form of excess or overstaying. This naturalises succession as a form of progress within the sport, devaluing expertise and longevity in femininity. The sheer level of celebrity of rookie star Caitlin Clark had attained in 2024 drew Taurasi into the undertow driven by a need for Clark-related clicks (Gaillot & Tarasova, 2024). Media narratives produced Taurasi’s candour about rookies’ entry into the league (“reality is coming”) as antagonism towards Clark, feminising intergenerational relations through rivalry narratives that were both clickable and disciplinary. Additionally, these media narratives existed alongside more vitriolic social media and media discourse that saw the WNBA’s physical style of play as a form of bullying of Clark, and veteran players’ lack of acknowledgement of Clark as intergenerational bitterness and feminine jealousy This led to wider villainising of older, LGBTQIA and black athletes in the media and online (Hill, 2024). As sportswriter Dave Zirin wrote, Clark became a “shibboleth” for those who wanted to weaponise her whiteness and imagine her as a straight white victim bullied by a Black, lesbian league Zirin (2024, para. 6). Here, Taurasi’s lesbian identity was also deployed in homophobic online commentary producing her and other players as villains. While her Latina identity was largely unmentioned in coverage, this elision may have privileged her in comparison to Black athletes whose visible ‘otherness’ subjects them to racist abuse and accusations of anti-whiteness (Merchant, 2024).

Media coverage of Taurasi’s final year illustrates how gendered narratives of age both celebrate and contain, individualise and depoliticise, and create a gendered timetable for sportswomen’s legitimacy as an athlete. Additionally, it highlights how age can be weaponised alongside gendered, racist and misogynist narratives that perpetuate the trivialisation and stereotyping of women athletes (see Bruce, 2016), which has historically impacted WNBA players since its inception. Intersecting structures of age, gender, sexuality and race simultaneously grant Taurasi symbolic authority, expose her to gendered ageism and render her vulnerable to homophobia and misogyny. In terms of this article’s primary focus of the influencing factor of age, this case shows how older sportswomen are not shaped by any single axis of difference, and are framed by narratives that celebrate longevity, while policing the limits of who can inhabit it.

Further Research

This study expands scholarship on age and athletes in professional sport, but is limited in its findings in that it was restricted to text-based coverage and to a single athlete within the context of one sport. It also highlights a significant area of further research is some the growing reliance of some media outlets on social media-driven storytelling where fan commentary and critique become the basis of, or contributes heavily to, generating stories and angles, and the potential to create a harmful feedback loop that might embolden those who perpetrate online harm. Social media has become a common source of newsgathering across a range of journalism (Knight & Cook, 2013), but the sensibilities and ethical norms of each outlet dictate how and to what extent this occurs. In the case of the sports outlets with reporting norms that value sensationalism, values like celebrity, conflict and the unusual are common drivers of sports news. This becomes a more pressing imperative when considered in the context of the serious and escalating issues around online abuse and harassment of players during 2024. Players reported online abuse and even death threats that season (Merchant, 2024). While changing storytelling modes have contributed to the way that Taurasi was subjected to forms of ageist misogyny, this incident reminds us that Black players were disproportionately targeted by online actors and media coverage that reproduced harmful discourse, subjecting them to compounding misogyny, racism and sexism in narratives that rendered them violent and anti-white. As Anders et al. (2023) remind us in their discussion of how representational intersectionality can best attend to “racist-misogynist-sexist constructions,” feminist work in sport needs to address racism. Meanwhile, abundant research reminds us of the troubling extent of online abuse of sportswomen (Kavanagh et al., 2019; McCarthy, 2022; Phipps, 2023). However, little yet examines how mainstream sports media might contribute to these harms through social media-generated and sensationalist reporting.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Brigid McCarthy

Ethical Considerations

After the completion of a checklist provided by the La Trobe University Human Ethics Committee, this study was granted a human research ethics exemption (EIBX25025).

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

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

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