Sustainable development of Olympic sport participation legacy: A scoping review based on the PAGER framework

After the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, Chinese officials claimed that the goal of “driving 300 million people to participate in ice and snow sports” had been achieved. Historically, the London 2012 Olympic Games had a similar goal: to increase sports participation for all by hosting the Olympic Games. Given these goals, the impact of the Olympic Games on sports participation has clearly become significant. These impacts can be referred to as the Olympic sport participation legacy, an intangible Olympic legacy. The Olympic sport participation legacy has attracted a lot of researchers’ interest in the academic field in recent years. This paper aims to conduct a scoping review of Olympic sport participation legacy studies between 2000 and 2021 to identify the progress of studies on the sustainability of Olympic sport participation legacies. Unlike previous scoping reviews on sport participation legacies, this review adopts a Patterns, Advances, Gaps, Evidence of Practice, and Research Recommendations (PAGER) framework at the results analysis stage to improve the quality of the findings. The results from the scoping review contained 54 peer-reviewed articles on three levels of research: the population level, social level, and intervention processes. Many studies indicate that achieving a sustainable Olympic sport participation legacy requires joint collaboration and long-term planning between governments, community organisations, and other stakeholders.