This present research aims at studying sport discourses and their links with the notion of identity by the act of naming in the discursive construction of a sportman or sportwomen referent. Two major events are considered, the last two big events organized in France : the olympic Games of Albertville 1992 and the soccer world Cup 1998 (won by the French national team). It is par- ticularly focused on the national and ethnic dimensions. Nationality and ethnicity are strongly linked in the imaginery representations of our official grouping. This study is syntactic, seman- tic and argumentative by analyzing both at syntagmatic and dialogical levels. Sports writings are usually close to the Aristotelician genre of epideictic but they tend to be more and more deliberative with some interests from the politics. They borrow some of its elements (termino- logy, syntax, prosody, etc.). Categorization is the link between the studies, confronting most of the time the dialectic of the Same and the Other by constent ingrouping ou outgrouping. This research leads to the conclusion that naming in sports discourses has a lot to tell about the confusions of identities but also about the complexity of social representations.