Valuing the inspirational impacts of major sports events

This chapter focuses on research conducted in the UK prior to London 2012 and evaluates the potential of major sporting events to inspire people to increase their participation in sport and active recreation. The results demonstrate that attending sports events can stimulate increases in participation at grassroots level. While these findings imply that there appears to be an inspiration effect, it is too simplistic to expose people to an event in the hope of changing their behaviour, as people are inspired in different ways. It is also problematic to attribute causality for improvements in activity behaviour to a single event.