Our first aim was to evaluate the representation of athletes in the top newspapers in a continental European country during two editions of the Paralympics and Olympics Games (London 2012 and Rio 2016), by means of quantitative content analysis. The second aim was to critically analyse how athletes are constructed in newspapers using Michel Foucault's theoretical framework on the construction of subjectivities and difference. The newspapers acting as an instrument, use a set of strategies to reinforce the differential treatment of Paralympic versus Olympic athletes: focusing on the effort, dedication and suffering only of athletes participating in the Paralympic Games, newspapers construct a discourse in which they separate, in an apparently natural way, some (Paralympic) athletes from other (Olympic) athletes. Two decades into the 21st century, even the newspapers of a liberal European democracy are using the same pathological model to cover Paralympic athletes who actively participate in sports competitions.