A foot in the IOC door

A foot in the IOC door

The International Olympic Committee is keen to know how young people view the Olympic Games and two University of Waikato sport and leisure academics are about to find out.

Dr Holly Thorpe and Associate Professor Belinda Wheaton have won an Advanced Olympic Research Grant Programme 2015/2016 Award for a project titled Youth perceptions of the Olympic Games: Attitudes towards action sports at the Youth Olympic Games and Olympic Games.

The pair research action sports, such as skateboarding, surfing, BMX, snowboarding, parkour and kite-surfing, and have written widely about youth participation and attitudes to action sports, the culture and the politics.

“Our study will be the first in-depth sociological investigation of how youth perceive the Olympics,” says Dr Thorpe, once a competitive snowboarder. “We applied for the programme knowing the IOC is facing a significant challenge - how to stay relevant to contemporary youth amid changing sport participation and consumption patterns and growing competition from mega-events such as the X Games.”

Dr Thorpe says it’s exciting for her and Dr Wheaton “to get a foot in the Olympic door”. There were more than 40 applications received from 24 countries for this round of grants and only seven were awarded.

“I think we were fortunate in that the IOC had read some of Belinda’s and my previous research. We’ve examined how sports such as wind-surfing, BMX and snowboarding were included in the Olympic programme and the how the different sports reacted. I think this new research follows on quite naturally from that.”

The researchers will do online surveys, media analysis and interviews which they hope will provide rich and nuanced insights into the experiences of action sports participants. Dr Wheaton says they plan to cover five continents and survey in six languages, working with action sports representatives and media houses to generate responses.

“We want to know the attitudes, opinions, debates and politics that influence youths’ current and future participation in, and consumption of, the Olympic Games. What do they want from these events, what are they watching at the Olympics, what changes would they like to see? This research should give us a good overview of world trends,” says Dr Wheaton.

They have a year to survey, collate and analyse the data they collect before presenting their findings to the IOC in Lausanne this time next year.

ENDS

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