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A case study investigating the impact of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games on participation in two non-traditional English sports, Judo and Fencing
journal contribution
posted on 2017-06-21, 15:09 authored by Athanasios (Sakis) Pappous, Emily HaydayEmily HaydayThe hosting of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOPG) brought with it detailed legacy plans aiming to ‘Inspire a Generation’. The idea that hosting a sports mega-event will encourage the host population to engage in more physical activity is commonly used by governments to justify the large investments they make. The aim of this research paper was to investigate the impact that hosting the 2012 Games had on grass-root sports participation within the host nation. This paper focuses on two non-traditional English sports, Fencing and Judo and investigated the changes in mass sports participation. The membership rate analysis of our sample highlighted an overall increase in participation between 2007 and 2013, in both Judo and Fencing. The data gathered from the interviews with the head office staff at the National Governing Bodies (NGBs) and local club coaches suggested that the grass-root participation programmes were the most effective way of increasing participation, rather than the reliance, solely on the inspiration effect from hosting the LOPG itself. The study highlighted the importance of strengthening communication between local voluntary clubs and the NGB, to ensure sports could promote themselves and capitalise on this global sporting phenomenon, which provided unprecedented media coverage and opportunities for these non-traditional sports. This case study provides initial results relating to the effect that a major international multi-sport event can have in the development of non-traditional sports in the host population, in terms of membership variations, participation programmes and organisational dynamics.
History
School
- Loughborough University London
Published in
Leisure StudiesVolume
35Issue
5Pages
668 - 684Citation
PAPPOUS, A. and HAYDAY, E.J., 2016. A case study investigating the impact of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games on participation in two non-traditional English sports, Judo and Fencing. Leisure Studies, 35 (5), pp.668-684Publisher
Routledge (© Taylor & Francis Group)Version
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2015-04-30Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Leisure Studies on 30th April 2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/02614367.2015.1035314ISSN
0261-4367eISSN
1466-4496Publisher version
Language
- en