The sportification of tourism and the tourismification of sport: A processual approach to ‘sport tourism’ (original) (raw)

Abstract

While sports and tourism, in their modern configurations, both developed around the same time (in the wake of the industrial revolution), it took over a century before the two came together in ‘sports tourism’. Various scholars have come up with models to categorize the various forms that sports tourism can take (e.g. hard vs. soft or sports event tourism vs. active sport tourism), but none of these is able to capture in full the constantly evolving cross-over between sports and tourism. Based on exploratory ethnographic research, this paper analyzes the processes involved in turning the recreational practice of long-distance trail running into ‘sports tourism’. While the sportification of play and the tourismification of travel have been widely discussed in sports studies and tourism studies respectively, this case study disentangles the sportification of tourism and the tourismification of sports. The former is linked to the renewed societal attention to the (healthy) body and the shift from (passive) sightseeing to more (active) experiential forms of tourism. The latter is related to the integration of sports events and activities within broader tourism packages (irrespective of whether the sports tourism involved is passive or active). Paradoxically, trail runners, who usually identify as ‘post-sport’ or counter-cultural, seem to be simultaneously resisting and reproducing the dominant tendencies of commercialization of life.

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