Abstract
A substantial amount of attention has been devoted towards the potential sport legacy of the Olympic Games. In spite of the increasing academic interest in this topic, there is a knowledge gap as far as sport legacy is concerned by types of different sports. The authors bridge this gap by analysing the evolution of 43 different Olympic/Paralympic sport modalities in the two-year period after the London 2012 Olympics. By using data from the Active People Survey with a sample of 165,000 people annually, and considering some demographic variables and the effect of the economic environment, the paper aims to test the existence of a sport legacy. We have applied time series analysis and ARIMA models for controlling for economic influence and seasonal adjustment and for making comparisons among participation rates. The results show, for the total of the sports analysed, that there were 336,000 individuals who increased their frequency of participation, while there was no significant increase in the number of new participants in these sports. When we develop the analysis for types of sports, London 2012 is positively associated not only with the frequency of participation in some types of sport but also with an increase in the number of new sport participants. Gender and age differences are also detected. The results show the differences of sport legacy by type of sports. Moreover, this research has elucidated an important unrecognised aspect of the effect of the Olympic Games and perhaps major events: that they can become a major policy tool for reversing sporting inequalities.
Highlights
A substantial amount of attention and debate has been devoted during the last few years towards the potential sport legacy effects of the Olympic Games
Compared with previous research, we have broadened the number of sports under study, we have considered a two-year period after the Games and we have applied ARIMA models to make comparisons among participation rates
When we develop the analysis for types of sports, we obtain that London 2012 is positively associated with regular participation in some types of sport and with an increase in the number of less regular participants, in particular in combat Olympic sports, with an increase of 8.23% and 21,000 participants at least once a month, confirming evidence shown by Pappous and Hayday (2015) for judo and fencing [32]
Summary
A substantial amount of attention and debate has been devoted during the last few years towards the potential sport legacy effects of the Olympic Games. This interest is closely associated with the need to increase sport and physical activity (PA) levels and reduce the sedentary behaviour of individuals. In Europe, the proportion of those who say they never exercise or play sport has increased between 2009 and 2017 to 46% [4] leading to one million premature deaths and corresponding to 10.4%. Despite the social interest in this field of study, there is a knowledge gap when considering the sport Olympic legacy due to the mixed results obtained by previous empirical evidence
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