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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Sports Act. Living
Sec. Sports Management, Marketing, and Economics
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fspor.2024.1460345
This article is part of the Research Topic Innovation, Technology and Sustainability in Sport Management and Education View all articles

Breaking ice: An In-depth Examination of China's Winter Sports Participation in the Wake of Beijing 2022

Provisionally accepted
Jingfan Zhou Jingfan Zhou 1,2*Athanasios (. Pappous Athanasios (. Pappous 1,2
  • 1 University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
  • 2 Department for Life Quality Studies, Bologna, Italy

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Research questions: Is there evidence from secondary data to suggest advancement towards Beijing 2022's objective of "Motivating 300 million individuals to engage in winter sports"?Research methods: This study explored the Beijing 2022 sport participation legacy by adopting a quantitative approach with triangulation. A diverse set of secondary longitudinal data and selected indicators from people, facilities/equipment, and market perspectives, according to the goal of engaging 300 million Chinese in winter sports were scrutinised.Results and findings: The preliminary findings highlight the multifaceted and complex nature of evaluating the sport participation legacy goal of a Sport Mega Event (SME). The broad definition of the goal to "Motivate 300 million people to engage in winter sports," as well as the characteristics of the political mission's cultural and systemic context, were some of the factors that played an important role when trying to assess this target. Moreover, this paper revealed three crucial mechanisms transmitting the passion of winter sports from SME to mass participation legacy, through quantitatively examining the promised target. There were "Leveraging sports policy", "Provision of facilities accompanying the integration of sport and education", and "Cooperative stakeholders` alliance strengthened by media power and technology".Implications: This paper represents one of the pioneering studies undertaking a comprehensive and extensive analysis in alignment with triangulation. We anticipate that this study will make a valuable contribution towards addressing the challenges posed by the broad and ambitious nature of Beijing 2022's goal, whilst facilitating further investigations on the transformative strategies.

    Keywords: Winter sports participation, Impact and legacy, Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, Social sustainability, Triangulation

    Received: 05 Jul 2024; Accepted: 30 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Zhou and Pappous. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jingfan Zhou, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.