Abstract: Understanding sportsmanship in Chinese society not only affects the realization of building China into a leading sporting nation and the long-term development of sports undertakings, but relates to the development of the country and the progress of social civilization. Taking the news coverage on sportsmanship in People's Daily from 1949 to 2020 as the research object, Python is used for coding and text analysis, and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model and frame theory are adopted to explore the mainstream concepts reflected in news discourse and its constructed sportsmanship sense. In the first stage (1949-2002), sportsmanship was presented to be "National Sports, Mass Participation", "Friendship First, Competition Second", "Winning Glory for the Country"; in the second stage (2003-2008), it was "Integrating into the Olympic Spirit", "Spreading Sport Culture", "Showing the National Image"; while in the third stage (2009-2020), it was "More Open", "More Inclusive" and "More Comprehensive". Sportsmanship changes along with time, reflecting the different time spirit in each stage. Its connotation evolution is not only a process of the change of understanding towards sport in Chinese society, but a demonstration of national confidence, development and social progress.