“How Sport Preserves Cultural Memory in Performance and Biography: Elite Women Gymnasts in China, Romania, Russian, and the US”

Cultures remember themselves and attempt to preserve integrity and distinctiveness with recurrent rituals, norms for bodily shape and role performance, and formulaic narratives. Sport well serves cultural memory by embracing all three mechanisms of cultural memory. Sport evokes attention from all senses of participants and spectators, binds culture in its discursive practices that are general, and usually provides a decisive resolution in otherwise ambiguous public lives. This paper focuses on the twenty-seven women from China, Romania, Russia, and the US whose teams occupied the top four places in the 1996 Olympic Games. (1) We describe distinctive aspects of recruitment and training in each country and document performance and bodily norms of each country’s athletes. (2) We then compare and contrast norms of how biographical and autobiographical narratives about the athletes ultimately provide efficient repositories of special cultural memories maintained by each of these nations. Globalization may include circulation of images, capital, and labor with a volume and pace which can diminish a culture’s special history and uniqueness. But the particular case of this cohort of gymnasts from four countries illustrates how sport can continue to encapsulate what is durable and isolable in the four countries.