ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a review of research examining individual athletes and their image repair strategies employed during scandals and crises. The findings detail the strategies used by athletes when faced with crises and the effectiveness of their strategies. Insights into how researchers conducted their studies also emerge, including type of media explored, timeframe(s) examined, number of data points used, and types of analyses completed. Researchers focused on athlete image repair strategies have reported additional ones: stonewalling, suffering and victimization, conforming and leveling the playing field, exposing critics, and retrospective regret. Researchers examining individual athletes and their image repair strategies noted that, combined, these studies provide a more comprehensive view of strategies used by athletes and document their varying levels of success in restoring an athlete's image. The athletes also used a combination of image repair strategies—denial, evading responsibility, reducing offensiveness, corrective action, mortification—with varying levels of success, from effective to mixed effectiveness, to not effective.
