The Press Conference as a Performance: Representing Haile Gebrselassie

Pre-event sports press conferences remain largely unexamined by sport sociologists. In this article we present a thick description (Geertz, 1973) of a recent press conference staged on behalf of the Ethiopian long-distance runner, Haile Gebrselassie. We first discuss the workings of whiteness in relation to the ways in which a black Ethiopian distance runner is imagined by Western sports journalists. Then, drawing on the work of a number of performance theorists, we conceptualize Gebrselassie’s press conference as a performance. Finally, we interpret the meaning of Gebrselassie’s press conference using the semiotics of Roland Barthes (1977).