Abstract
Sport participation legacies are often offered as reasons to host mega-sport events, yet there is little evidence to demonstrate the claim’s legitimacy, thus we examine “What did Whistler Sports do to leverage the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games to facilitate a sport tourism legacy?”. Through a prospective longitudinal case study of WAS and application of the temporal extension of the socioecological framework, multiple data sources were analyzed from over a decade beginning before the event until 2019. The findings reveal the situated and embedded nature of mega-sport event legacies i.e., context. These depend upon a network of facilitators such as local, provincial, and federal policies; pre-event and post-event vision and strategies from local communities and sport organizations; the development of a pool of willing and flexible volunteers. Together these were strategically leveraged to overcome sport participation and sport tourism barriers for people with disabilities. The sport, tourism, and sport tourism experience reflected Whistler’s natural and infrastructure advantage and the needs and desires of locals and visitors with access needs that could not have occurred without the capital injection of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Leveraging the mega-sport event opportunities required leadership and a strategic vision for repositioning to a year-round program. This strategic change also opened new sport and sport tourism opportunities for current participants but importantly brought new participants and their friendship groups to Whistler over the post-event decade for year-round sustainable adaptive sport opportunities.
Highlights
Host communities are commonly told that after hosting mega-sport events (MSE), including the Olympic and Paralympic Games, beneficial social legacies would remain such as increased sport participation and physical activity (e.g., [1,2,3,4])
We review the theoretical framework in which this research is situated, the conceptual framework used for analysis, i.e., the temporal extension of socioecological framework (TESEF), the research question and methods
Using the momentum and opportunities provided by Vancouver2010, Whistler Adaptive Sports (WAS)’s board and Executive Director (ED) sought strategic engagements with other sporting organizations, disability organizations, and disability sporting organizations to leverage Vancouver2010 to continue to evolve from a single program, single disability to a highly complex facilitator-organization offering multiple sporting programs within a sport tourism context across the year, to thousands of individuals for many years beyond Vancouver2010
Summary
Host communities are commonly told that after hosting mega-sport events (MSE), including the Olympic and Paralympic Games, beneficial social legacies would remain such as increased sport participation and physical activity (e.g., [1,2,3,4]). For parasport events the legacy potential is reflected in the International Paralympic Committee’s (IPC’s) Paralympic legacy goals including, “sport structures/organizations for people with an impairment, from grassroots to elite level” [5]. Despite these opportunities, community/grassroots, and para/disability sport participation and legacy research and practice languishes behind the mainstream [6,7]. Community/grassroots, and para/disability sport participation and legacy research and practice languishes behind the mainstream [6,7] This translates into more ad hoc approaches to disability sport and tourism, including event leveraging, through inadequate facilitating policies, poor policy operationalization, relatively underdeveloped sport development pathways, inadequate training resources, and inaccessible environments and transport [7,8,9]. Converting the latent potential to an actual increase in sporting participation across the lifespan will facilitate greater social impacts beyond sport [7,11,12]
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