A pre-evaluation of British public opinion on the London 2012 Olympics based on sport participation types

As recalled by Girginov and Hills (2008), one ambitious aim in staging the London 2010 Olympics concerns sports development and participation legacy. According to them, this objective comes from both the IOC‟s will to create positive legacies from the Games and the promotion of sports-for-all in the host country, and the bid committee and the UK government‟s will to “use the games to inspire the country‟s people to become more physically active” (p.2092). However, as observed by Coalter (2004), the positive impact of major events on sports participation is not automatic and moreover Olympic “legacies are constructed and not given” (Girginov & Hills, 2008, p.2092). The aim of this study is to provide a pre-evaluation of the London Olympics in relation to sport participation patterns in order to first identify the critical issues influencing British people‟s engagement into the Games and second to create the basis for a longitudinal analysis of their impact. In order to evaluate people‟s perceptions of London 2012, we used Social Representation Theory (Moscovici, 1984), as social representations characterise a form of socially elaborated and shared knowledge, with practical consequences which contribute to the construction of a common reality among social groups.