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This test assesses your ability to write an essay that expresses your view on a topic.
Your essay will be assessed for its content, organisation and language:

Content:
- fulfillment of task
- sophistication and sufficiency of ideas
- analysis and use of information from the reading texts to support ideas
Organisation:
- clarity of overall structure
- logical development of ideas
Language:
- accuracy grammar, mechanics, cohesive devices
- fluency communicative quality, vocabulary use and register

Notes and instructions

1. Read Texts A, B and C carefully and write an argumentative essay in about 500 words in
response to the following question.
In many societies, excellent sports persons are viewed as heroes in their society and are
regarded as role models for youths. Other people are of the view that such sports figures
should not be held up as role models. Which view do you agree with?

2. Use information from the texts, your knowledge and experience to support your arguments.
3. Use page 6 to plan and organise your ideas for the essay.
4. Write your essay on pages 7-10. You are expected to acknowledge information taken from
the reading texts.

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Text A
Why do we make athletes role models?
It was an ugly week in the world of sports. Lance Armstrong, the all-American cancer survivor
who set the record in cycling for winning seven Tour de France championships admitted in an
Oprah Winfrey interview that he achieved his titles by doping. Manti Teo, a nationwide icon for
the courage he displayed in playing the day after his grandmother and girlfriend died, admitted
that it was all a hoax. A National Football League player was arrested at an airport for trying to
take a concealed weapon on a plane. The sports section reads much more like the crime beat section
of a newspaper due to the drumbeat of off-field problems. This all raises the question as to whether
it is appropriate to look to athletic figures as role models and whether they should be held up to
circumspect levels of conduct.
Former National Basketball Association superstar and current television analyst Charles Barkley
is clear that the answer is a resounding NO. He believes that athletes are not the figures that
children should be emulating. He feels that it is parents who have the obligation and responsibility
to be role models. He believes players have a duty to give peak performance on the court, and that
is it.
The celebrity-making machine with its focus on interesting personalities brings these celebrities
into our living rooms daily. Athletes often become figures of admiration and emulation in this
sports obsessed society. Young people especially tend to look to athletes as models whether we
wish them to or not. It is also this admiration that drives the sports entertainment industry. These
athletes who play at a competitive level depend on public support; they compete for fan viewership,
ticket sales and lucrative endorsement deals. If their fans become disillusioned by their behavior,
these fans can easily turn their attention elsewhere. So, on a practical level being held up as heroes
and icons is a financial necessity.
Beyond the dollars and cents, athletes should envision themselves as role models and responsible
members of the communities that helped build and shape them. This does not assume they will at
every moment be behaviorally correct; we all make mistakes and mature and grow from them.
Nonetheless, there are several ways athletes can show their commitment to the community. For
example, some well-known athletes have played their part and established scholarship funds or
retrofitted athletic equipment or helped their church or Boys and Girls Club in the community
they grew up in. A number of players have endowed scholarships at their colleges, setting an
example for younger players and staying linked to that college community.
What all these athletes were modeling was their heart, initiative and the ability for all of us to
improve our communities and tackle problems. So, when Heavyweight Boxing Champion Lennox
Lewis said on a public service announcement that Real Men Dont Hit Women he made a great
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contribution to young peoples perception of what is embodied in true masculinity. Disaffected
teenagers may tune out authority figures parents, teachers, and commercial messages, but a
superstar athlete can gain those teenagers attention to deliver a message of inspiration and hope.
Adapted from: Steinberg, L. (January 21, 2013) Why do we make athletes role models? Forbes. Retrieved May 13,
2013 from http://www.forbes.com/sites/leighsteinberg/2013/01/20/why-do-we-make-athletes-role-models/

Text B
Dangerous myth of the role model athlete
Way back in 2008, the three most admired personalities in sport were probably Tiger Woods,
Lance Armstrong and Oscar Pistorius. They were portrayed not just as great athletes but as great
men, role models: Woods was the ultimate professional, Armstrong had overcome cancer to rule
cycling, and the double amputee Pistorius had become an outstanding sprinter. It later turned out
that Woods was a serial adulterer, Armstrong a drugs cheat, and recently, in South Africa, Pistorius
was charged with murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.
Any sentient person over the age of eight already knew that great athletes are not necessarily role
models. That is not what the scandals have taught us. Rather, we can see now that the sportsindustrial complex the machine of media and advertising that cranks out myths about athletes
has gone into overdrive. As with investment banking it might be time to shrink it before it destroys
society.
Like most modern industries, the sports-industrial complex arose in the United States. Its
operatives understood that if people viewed great athletes merely as ordinary humans with one
unusual gift, hardly anyone would bother following sport. So, drawing on a myth it was proclaimed
that sportsmen possessed special moral characteristics. Athletes were tenacious, they sacrificed;
they took one for the team. The sports-industrial complex was already pumping out stories about
American athletes who loved their mamas and drank the right soft drink while Europes best
footballers were still taking the tram to work.
From the early 1990s, satellite TV and then the internet promoted sport globally, taking the sportsindustrial complex with it. Its role models are now marketed worldwide. In interviews and
commercials Armstrong fought cancer, Pistorius fought for the disabled, and Woods fought for
the global consulting and outsourcing firm Accenture.
Male athletes have taken over roles once held by knights, saints and soldiers. They represent the
masculine ideal (female athletes remain less saleable, unless very pretty). In todays vast
mythmaking enterprise, the athletes serve only as raw material to be transformed from humans
into paragons. All the athletes need to do is parrot the myth. My example can be an inspiration to
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those who, like me, have experienced and struggled with a physical problem, writes Pistorius in
his autobiography, Blade Runner . This can also be true for others who have had to overcome
obstacles of a different nature. He was a role model for all humanity. Or so we thought.
There are now vacancies for role models to replace Woods, Armstrong, Pistorius, Teo, and Ryan
Giggs, the most admired man in English footballs Premier League until his complicated sex
life was revealed. Replacements will be found and later will fall. Only the sports-industrial
complex goes on forever.
Adapted from: Kuper, S. (February 15 2013). Dangerous myth of the role model athlete. Financial Times. Retrieved
May 13 2013 from http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5fd88a96-76e2-11e2-8569-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2TBL4pqh6

Text C
Villains, fools or heroes? Sports stars as role models for young people
It is questionable whether modern day sports stars can be perceived as heroic in the traditional
sense, for few can live up to the Muscular Christian imagery of the Victorian era, where male
sporting heroes were admired for high morals and exemplary sporting behaviour, displaying
courage, loyalty and bravery. However, such lingering values of sporting heroes continue
suggesting sport stars should maintain traditional social standards both on and off the pitch.
The rhetoric of nineteenth century Public Schools ideological legacy promoting character
development and the making of the man through participation on the playing fields, still resound
in sporting narrative. The construction of the sports star as hero thus embodies traditional and
idealised values and ethics of the gentleman and amateur.
Sports heroes are clearly promoted by the media as a source of national pride and function to
represent national qualities, traditions and distinctions. Discourses of sporting heroism revolve
around positive images of sporting physical prowess with references to style, skill, excellence in
performance and entertainment value. Television programmes such as Sports Personality of the
Year, National Portrait Gallery Sporting Heroes Exhibition and the Queens Honours awarded to
sport stars all suggest that the sporting prowess of performers is socially valued. As Inside Sport
(1998, January, p. 15) suggests:
Sport stars are fashion items, in favour when they win, out when they lose.
They have skills worthy of admiration, but they are basically entertainers and
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The sporting hero is thus seen to embody valued masculine characteristics, such as being strong,
brave, tough, and powerful, all of which are evident in the sporting discourse. These reflect
courage, integrity, competitiveness and success, all traditionally perceived to develop through
sporting endeavours.

Heroes or villains?
Contemporary sporting stars offer a complexity of images; the lingering legacy of sport as
promoting fair play, courage and bravery is contrasted with tales of drug taking, rule breaking,
commercial profit and win at all costs within the field of play. The dichotomy of heroes and
heroines as celebrity creates the current dilemma as to whether sport stars can, or should be,
worthy role models for young people. For the media informs its readers about, and celebrates the
nature of, the fame, fortune and good looks of the celebrity. Yet the nature of media intrusion also
reflects images of many of the social problems of everyday life. Aspects of male sport stars
personal lives reveal the use and abuse of drugs and alcohol (England rugby international,
Lawrence Dallaglio and footballers, Paul Merson and Tony Adams), wife and girlfriend beatings
(footballers Paul Gascoigne and Stan Collymore) and highly profiled extra-marital affairs (exEngland rugby player, Will Carling and Tiger Woods), all of which are amplified by the media.
These question the idea of individual exemplar and the widely held beliefs about the social and
moral benefits of sporting participation. If elite sportsmen can no longer embody this, then
upholding such values will become so much harder.
Adapted from: Lines, G. (2001). Villains, fools or heroes? Sports stars as role models for young people, Leisure
Studies. 20:4, 285-303. Retrieved May 15 2013 from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02614360110094661

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