audience has progressively declined, just like the rest of the sports newspapers printed in Spain. However, its readers represent half of the sports press audience, overtaking As; Sport y Mundo Deportivo combined. Marca registered an average of 3, 011, 000 readers/day from February-November 2012 and 2016 2, 165, 000 readers/day. This means that Marca can significantly influence the image projected of sport in general and, more specifically, of the Olympic Games and women’s participation in them.

Our analysis is focused on the special supplements on the Olympic Games published by Marca: the 2012 Games Supplement from 27 July to 13 August 2012 and The Games Newspaper with Marca as the headline. Games of the XXXXI Rio Olympic Games 2016 from 2 to 23 August 2016. Therefore these are the periods of our analysis: from 27 July to 13 August 2012 and from 2 to 23 August 2016. The methodology employed combines quantitative and qualitative techniques such as content analysis –exploratory and descriptive approaches to formulating reproducible and valid inferences applicable to a context based on certain data (Krippendorff, 2018)– and critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk, 1999). We make a critical reading of the supplements published before the beginning of the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Games to verify how interested Marca is in Spanish sportswomen at the beginning of the two Olympic Games. We also determine whether the women’s success in London 2012 positively influenced Marca’s initial coverage of women’s sports in Rio 2016.

Subsequently, we study the news value of the Spanish sportswomen’s nationality as Marca’s priority over the news value of the sport’s success through a quantitative analysis of the supplements and a critical reading of their covers. News values are those criteria that influence the choice of an event as publishable news, i.e., those values that give information interest to an event.

In order to carry out this quantitative analysis, we study the information units where female athletes –who compete individually or as a team– constitute the subject of the headline either by being named directly, “Carolina Marín is also the queen of audiences ”(26/8/2016 p. 14) or indirectly, “It’s now or now” (20/08/2016 p. 17), a headline that refers to the Spanish rhythmic gymnastics team. The women’s spotlight can be exclusive (“Mireia Shines” 8/08/2016 cover) or shared with male athletes (“Athleticism is recovering” 22/08/2016 p. 4, the headline of a news item about Ruth Beitia’s and Orlando Ortega’s performance). Our analysis focuses on the news items in which sportswomen are exclusively in the headline.

The following are considered information units 1) the texts of any news genre published by the newspaper, made up of headlines, the body of text and photographs or not; 2) the headlines without text or images that the newspaper publishes on the cover of the supplements and 3) the photo news or headlines only accompanied by a photograph.

244 information units have been registered from London 2012 (183 correspond to national athletes and 61 to international athletes) and 218 information units for Rio 2016 (147 on national athletes and 71 on international athletes). Data is gathered from each of these information units for which a spreadsheet has been used for quantitative processing.

Of all the variables used for data collection, the following have been used for this article: to identify the information unit in its journalistic context, the categories Headline, subheadline, Date of Publication, and the page number. To identify