‘Couple goals’: Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir as celebrity romance text at the 2018 Winter Olympic Games

ABSTRACT

At the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, Canadian ice dance pair Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir won two gold medals, making them the most decorated Olympic figure skaters of all time. However, it was not their on-ice achievements that dominated coverage; rather, it was the possibility that were in an off-ice romantic relationship.

This article explores why Virtue and Moir were read so relentlessly as romantically involved in coverage of the Pyeongchang Olympics. Using a corpus of approximately seventy articles written about the pair in February 2018, it combines two different reading methods: a distant reading to elucidate patterns, and a close reading for thematic analysis. It finds that Virtue and Moir were read romantically because they embodied two different romantic discourses: the discourses of ‘romance’ and ‘intimacy’ as outlined by David Shumway, which emphasise passion and emotional closeness respectively. It concludes that Virtue and Moir were read not just as romantically involved but as ‘couple goals’, because of their apparent success in embodying these two (not necessarily mutually agreeable) discourses, which highlights cultural narratives about romantic love in the Anglophone cultural imagination.

KEYWORDS:

• Romantic love
• ice dancing
• Winter Olympics
• sporting celebrity
• couples

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Indeed, during the final stages of editing this article, Moir is reported to have announced his engagement to another woman (Kappler 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jodi McAlister

Dr Jodi McAlister is a Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University in Melbourne. Her research interests include representations of romantic love in popular culture and the operations of the popular fiction industry, and she has published widely in journals such as Continuum, Sexualities, and Participations. She is also an author, and her young adult novels Valentine (2017), Ironheart (2018), and Misrule (2019) are published by Penguin Teen Australia.