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This study investigates Chinese perceptions of Rio’s destination image before and after the 2016 Olympics. Samples of 573 and 564 residents from Shanghai were surveyed before and after the event. The Olympics raised awareness of Rio and as an Olympic host city. Post-games perceptions of affective image and tourist attractions were higher for people aware that Rio had hosted the Olympics. However, pre-games perceptions of tourism infrastructure and service in Rio were lower for participants aware that Rio would host the Olympics, and that the post-games perceptions of tourism infrastructure and service were lower than pre-games perceptions.

This article sought to answer questions concerning the aspects that are changing and those that remains unchanged regarding football in China during Xi’s authoritarian era by comparing the governance of Chinese professional football during this era and during a previously examined former era to provide a point of departure for empirical studies concerning the recent ascent of football in China. At the league-governance level, the Chinese Football Association (CFA) has prioritized the salience of professional football clubs (PFCs). At the club-governance level, the CFA has adopted a gradualist approach to institutional reform by proceeding through a process of introducing private or state-owned enterprises. The actual goal setting remains unchanged, and underachievement of the national football team persists. Comprehensive document analysis that included international peer-reviewed journal articles, books or book chapters, academic reports, policy documents, and influential media in China was performed.

Research question: This article explores policy transfer in the context of (non-professional) elite sport development through a detailed examination of Chinese elite swimming organisations since the early 2000s. The analysis is structured according to the five main aspects of policy transfer: rationale, actors, sources, elements and content, and conditioning factors.\ud Research methods: Data were collected from 15 semi-structured interviews with officials, coaches and scholars. These interviews were complemented by a content analysis of official and semi-official documents from both relevant sports governing bodies and influential Chinese media.\ud Results and findings: The major findings are that (1) the most important factors propelling the policy transfer were poor performances at major international sports events and a desire to be successful at the home Olympic Games; (2) the key policy transfer actors included government ‘insiders’ and foreign experts; (3) Australia was the main source of new policy because of a combination of political, geographical, economic and sport-specific factors; (4) the policy content transferred focused mainly on ideas, methods and techniques rather than deeper-level structures and ideology; and (5) source nations sought to constrain the policy transfer process.\ud Implications: Although policy transfer can be effective, there can be unintended negative consequences. Policy transfer is a bilateral process which is reliant upon the support of organisations or individuals from source nations. This research can stimulate elite sport programmes to consider the merits of pursuing policy transfer, when to pursue policy transfer and how to pursue policy transfer.

This study examines the relationship between player pay dispersion and team performance in the National Basketball Association (NBA) in North America. Specifically, the pay dispersion across teammates in each NBA team was analyzed according to four different models based on their playing time and team performance. Salary data for all NBA teams were collected over 23 consecutive seasons from between 1995-96 to 2017-18. Pay dispersion was measured using the Gini coefficient. Key findings are that the effects of the dispersion are positive for the model with all players in their teams, whereas the effects of pay dispersion on team performance are negative for the models with players who have more playing time, which indicates that greater pay dispersion among the most contributing players is associated with lower team performance. Teams should consider how they can more fairly allocate their capped payrolls among the highest contributing players on their teams based on the equity principle of distributive justice. Teams should consider how they prepare and incorporate other reward methods, such as signing bonuses, which may reduce injustice perceptions of underpaid players and eventually enhance team performance.

This paper investigates the elite sport legacies of hosting the Summer Olympics for China (Beijing 2008) and Australia (Sydney 2000). The classic organisational life cycle approach provides the conceptual framework for this retroductive study. The data for both cases is sourced from official publications, academic research, and documents from various government departments and organisations. Additional data is drawn from three semi-structured interviews with key Chinese stakeholders. The analysis provides clear evidence that governments and their stakeholders use the opportunities afforded by a home Olympics to boost Olympic performance. China and Australia experienced a similar four-phase pattern of elite sport legacy life cycle: start-up, growth, maintenance, and decline. Both countries also shared many similar policy and management factors throughout each stage. An increased awareness of the sequential nature of elite sport legacy can help Olympic host countries make a more informed decision about their long-term strategies for elite sport success.

A variety of factors have contributed to China’s recent recovery in elite swimming in particular its success in the London Olympiad. The poor performance at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games was a ‘wake-up call’, which in conjunction with Beijing’s successful Olympic bid in 2001, opened policy windows prompting large-scale review and reform from which a broad range of ‘heavyweight’ policy actions were introduced and implemented. However, the road to recent success has been ‘bumpy’ during which there were other key events that have left an indelible imprint on Chinese swimming. Therefore, the multiple streams framework in general and the concept of policy windows in particular afford a theoretical gateway to structure policy analysis of elite swimming in China. Moreover, as a Western-derived theory the application of which to a sports context has been very sporadic, the multiple streams framework is evaluated regarding its applicability, or ‘compatibility’. Five semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders were conducted, accompanied by comprehensive document analysis of official documents and website information of associated sports-governing bodies and associations, and influential domestic and foreign media.

© 2018 Sport Management Association of Australia and New Zealand. In this article, the authors examine interorganisational conflict between provincial and national sport organisations in China. The authors theoretically ground the research in work related to interorganisational relationships and interorganisational conflict. The three case studies are artistic gymnastics, swimming, and cycling, and the authors conducted interviews with 11 staff from the relevant national-level sport organisations. Secondary data was sourced from official publications, websites, and influential domestic media. The key finding is that, whilst famed for its top-down bureaucratic system, there is considerable interorganisational conflict within the Chinese sport system. The extent and characteristics of the national-provincial conflict vary between sports. But there is also some consistency regarding the causes of the conflict and the measures adopted to mitigate the tension. Interorganisational conflict provides a useful heuristic for articulating and understanding the interorganisational relationships within the Chinese elite sport system and hence advances elite sport management research.

By analyzing China’s approaches to elite cycling, this paper seeks to answer the question why the bicycle kingdom failed to produce any Olympic cycling champions. Many factors could explain China’s lack of medal success on the international stage, ranging from the limited degree of organizational specialization, problems regarding the quantity and quality of domestic coaches, to the lack of influence in the international governing body and more importantly the tension between the national team and provincial teams. However, there have been a series of developments contributing to China’s notable progress in cycling in the 2000s in general and in the London Olympiad in particular, the most important of which were the recruitment of world-leading coaches and the organization of overseas training. All these culprits and positive developments are discussed, not only to explain China’s overall poor medal performance in cycling at the Olympic Games yet with some gradual progress in recent years, but also to provide a representative through which China’s approaches to many non-traditional and less-successful sports can be understood. Four semi-structured interviews were conducted, accompanied by comprehensive document analysis derived from official documents and website information of associated sports governing bodies and influential media in China.

Research question: Much research has been carried out to analyse factors contributing to China's notable success at the Olympic Games over the past decade. However, research which examines China's deliberate Olympic medal strategy remains relatively uncharted territory. Thus this paper seeks to address this gap and examines how China has become one of the most successful superpowers at the Summer Olympic Games within the last two decades by virtue of the application of the competitive advantage framework.\ud \ud Research methods: Seven semi-structured interviews were conducted with key stakeholders of elite sport in China. These data were supplemented by a range of official publications of sports governing bodies in China, their websites and related information from the websites of influential media.\ud \ud Results and findings: It is evidenced that China's current Olympic configuration and (gold) medal distribution among sports/disciplines are largely underpinned by Tian Maijiu's research on cluster-based sports training and the ‘Five-Word principle’ (i.e. Small, Fast, Women, Water and Agile). In addition, there is clear evidence of China's continuous expansion of its market and the ambition to greater success in gold-medal abundant and collective ball sports/disciplines.\ud \ud Implications: This article concludes by critically examining the key characteristics and outcomes of China's approach to clustering and prioritisation, attempting to provide some insights into the establishment or refinement of Olympic (gold) medal strategy for other nations, where China may provide some useful lessons. The compatibility of the competitive advantage framework with the analysis of China's Olympic success is also discussed.

Despite a plethora of studies focussing on sports mega event volunteering, little is known about volunteers who live outside of the host city. This exploratory research makes a novel contribution by focusing on a group of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games volunteers from a non-host region. Within this context, the study explores volunteers’ motives, the utility of using financial subsidies to support volunteering participation, and their attitudes towards post-event volunteering. Semi-structured interviews with twelve volunteers were conducted, accompanied by interviews with key local stakeholders. The findings suggest that Olympic-related factors and altruistic feelings were central motivations to volunteering. Some previous volunteering experiences increased confidence levels to volunteer at the Olympics. The financial scheme was perceived as an impetus further enhancing Leicestershire residents’ confidence to volunteer. Program participants also indicated positive attitudes towards future volunteering intentions.

This article presents an exploration of a non-Western nation’s responses to globalisation through an in-depth analysis of elite artistic gymnastics in China over a lengthy time span. The concept of globalisation and patterns of ‘reach’ and ‘response’ act as the heuristic devices underpinning the analysis. Data were collected from a range of documents and from six semi-structured interviews. The trajectory of Chinese elite artistic gymnastics’ responses to globalisation can be characterised as a passive response in the 1950s, a participative response in the first half of the 1960s, a conflictual response from 1966 to the early 1970s, a participative response from the early 1970s to the 2012 Olympic Games, and a passive response, once again, during the Rio Olympiad (post-London 2012). In this way, a nation’s responses to globalisation are seen as dynamic rather than rigid or static. China’s case also demonstrates that a nation can have a degree of autonomy when responding to globalisation, although in extreme cases, a nation-state can choose to resist this globalising context, largely depending on a government’s attitude towards globalisation and the value the government attaches to it.

Competitive balance is important because it enhances outcome uncertainty and therefore it promotes spectator interest, and encourages government investment in a sport. This article analyses the distribution of gold medals, medals, medal points and top eight points amongst nations in table tennis from 1988 to 2016 at the Olympic Games and the World Championships respectively. A normalised version of the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index and a coefficient of variation are calculated for each nation’s share of these performance indicators. The key findings are that China dominates both events, with successful female players being more dominant than their male counterparts. The competitive balance for gold medals has declined, whilst there is a trend towards improved competitive balance for top eight points for women, suggesting that more teams are featuring in the top eight (but not necessarily the top three) placings. This research has implications for the development of table tennis competitions. Compared to other racket sports, the issue of competitive imbalance in table tennis is particularly thorny, which threatens the long-term development of this sport. Accordingly, some measures are recommended for the International Olympic Committee and the International Table Tennis Federation to propel a more balanced development of international table tennis.