A content analysis review of media reports on choking under pressure among elite athletes and teams: The intersection of media narrative and academic discourse

In high-stakes competitive sport, the phenomenon of "choking"—a critical performance failure under pressure—presents a significant paradox. Athletes and teams with exceptional skill, honed through years of practice, can suddenly and catastrophically underperform when the stakes are highest (e.g., Baumeister, 1984; Hill et al., 2010; Mesagno et al., 2008). While sport psychology conceptualizes choking as a complex, multi-faceted disruption of cognitive and emotional processes (Mesagno & Hill, 2013; Mesgno & Bekmann, 2017), public understanding is largely shaped by a more powerful and reductive force: the mass media (e.g., Harpper & Philo, 2013). The media plays a central role in constructing the narrative around these public failures (Mesagno & Hill, 2013). By simplifying complex events into compelling stories of individual collapse, it often labels athletes and teams with the enduring and stigmatizing "choker" identity. This narrative framing has tangible consequences, contributing to significant psychological distress, including anxiety and depression, and fostering a "culture of silence" around athlete mental health (Mesagno et al., 2024), as exemplified by cases like Naomi Osaka's withdrawal from the 2021 French Open (Carayol, 2021) and Simone Biles pulled out from 2020 Olympics Tokyo (Bassi, 2021).This creates a critical discrepancy: the media's indiscriminate use of the term "choke" for any performance decrement blurs the precise, acute phenomenon that science seeks to understand (Mesagno & Hill, 2013). To bridge this gap between public narrative and scientific knowledge, a systematic investigation into media portrayals of choking is essential. This review aims to systematically analyze how print media constructs the narrative of "choking" in elite athletes and teams and to critically compare these narratives against established scientific understandings from sport psychology and sociology.