On 27 July 2012, a day in which the opening ceremony of the Olympic games was to take place, Marca published the special supplement “Ready, Steady, Go” in which it referred to the London Olympic venue and mainly to the athletes who were expected to win medals and /or break a record. The content analysis of this supplement shows that on the one hand, the news importance is given to sporting success and, on the other hand, how Spanish female athletes are not sporting references for Marca in the beginning. However, neither are female international athletes; in other words, women’s sports do not grab the newspaper’s attention. This can already be seen from the subheadline of the cover of this supplement: “Gasol, Phelps or Bolt are some of the sportsmen who will try to break records over the next 15 days in one of the most emblematic cities in the world.”

The cover and the main pages focus on the NBA, Paul Gasol, Michel Phelps, Yonan Blake, Usain Bolt, Asafa Powell, Tyson Gay, Roger Federer, David Ferrer, and the Brazilian men’s football team in texts and images of the 16-page supplement- 10 after taking away 6 pages of advertising. Women’s sport is referred to on only two pages, 9 and 14, in the last paragraphs of the news; and the 24 photos in which athletes appear, only 4 are of a female athlete; and of these, only one is of Spanish sportswomen: a photograph of the female synchronised swimming team’s legs sticking out of the water.

There is a column with the headline “Favourites to be crowned on the athletics track” on the right-hand side of page 9, 8 photographs and texts of the leading sportsmen and women expected to win medals: 4 of them refer to non-national sportswomen. Spanish sportswomen only appear on page 14, the last news page of the supplement. On this page, five short texts refer to the Spanish representative’s chances of winning, with only one of them- “Silver mermaids, podium certainty”- dedicated to the national synchronised swimming athletes (there is no male team in this discipline). The women’s sychronised swimming team had won the silver medal and the duo medal with Andrea Fuentes and Gemma Mengual at the previous Olympic Games in Beijing 2008.

Spanish sportswomen won more medals –11 than the male representatives’ 6 medals in the London 2012 Olympic Games–. The increasing media importance given to women’s sports could lead one to believe that Marca would give more media coverage to Spanish women’s sports at the beginning of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. However, this was not the case; female national athletes barely appeared in the articles and images. The newspaper scarcely covered women’s sports in the days before the start of the Games.

During those days, Marca published the supplement The Games Newspaper with the following headline: Pure Gold (2 August), Ready (3 August), Steady…(4 August) Go!!!! (5 August). The presence of both female national and international athletes is anecdotal in photos.