Abstract

(Skills Practice) Article Major Sport Events and Long-Term Tourism Impacts Harry ArneSolberg&Holger Preuss
Sør-Trøndelag University CollegeJohannes Gutenberg University
The article is based on the expected long-term returns compared to the investments made by cities hosting major sport events. The most common events are the Olympics and FIFA World Cup. Most of the applicant cities as per the authors do not meet the requirements to host such mega events, this are mainly the small cities that have little supporting infrastructure and the sport facilities needed. The revenues generated from such events are mostly capable to pay off the operational costs but hardly meet the amount used to build the infrastructures.
Tourism can be stimulated buy this events, this depends on the events that occur before, during and after the events, this is due to emerging issues like terrorism and other forms of crime. An increase to the number tourist does reflect a positive change in demand and supply if not both. The method used in this article is mainly theoretic as it takes into account of past events as their influence on the host countries and the countries at large. The authors have the conclusions that not all the expectations are reached after all the investing for those infrastructures to facilitate the major sport events. This is due to the fact that most of the funds spend may never be recovered as the post-event activities mostly do not turn out to be as expected (Solberg and Preuss).
The important contributions of this paper is to show that the bidding cities should not be too optimistic to make high benefits in terms of returns either short term or long term. They focused on the economic gains of hosting major sport events though they can as well be criticized for assumption that most cities never earn the expected economic gains. This is because the facilities left can be used to host similar events were they can earn the lost revenues as there shall be no building on new structures. They could have included such situations in the paper as it is part of the post event period though not in such a shorter time as referred in the paper (Solberg and Preuss).
Works Cited
Solberg, Harry Arne and Holger Preuss. ” Major Sport Events and Long-Term Tourism Impacts.” Journal of Sport Management 21 (2007): 213-234.