Sportainment. Facing a new dimension of sports

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Communications - Broadcast and entertainment, grade: 1,0, , language: English, abstract: It doesn't matter if you are an enthusiastic fan of a soccer club, a professional worldclass athlete, the owner of a sports association or even "just" a person that follows the daily news about sport affaires: Sport has become one of the major topics of (almost) everybody's life in the twenty-first century. Besides, sport can be related to as many aspects of life as possible. Nowadays, sportive activities or even sport events are significant motivations for planning your holidays and that is why sport and tourism achieve high synergies together. Sport has also emerged as global mass entertainment, and is now one of the most powerful and far-reaching communications platforms in the world. Global sport events offer the capacity and possibility to reach vast numbers of people worldwide. By extension, high-performance athletes have become global as they sell themselves to the bright public. And as a result, they become powerful ambassadors, spokespeople and role-models. The creation of the term "sportainment" reflects the increasing importance of the entertaining sports industry. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to examine the relation between sports and entertainment, sports and tourism as well as entertaining sports and tourism. I am going to concentrate my focus on the following questions: - What is the importance of sports and how can it be related to tourism? - What is "sportainment" and how can its relevance be described in the twenty-first century? - How does "sportainment" influence tourism? - How does "sportainment" influence international sport events? Hence, the first two chapters build the theoretical framework of this paper. Chapter two examines the importance of sports and the rising appearance of sports as tourism. Chapter three explains the term "sportainment", gives examples and finally relates it to international tourism. Chapter four analyses the Olympic Winter Games of Vancouver 2010 as a global project towards an entertaining sport event and examines its tourism impacts.