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The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between the attributes of Olympic mascots and their impact on sponsorship effectiveness. Based on a multiattribute model and the introduction of engagement theory and the meaning transfer model, this article uses the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics mascot “Bing Dwen Dwen” as the research object to empirically analyze the effects and mechanisms of the mascot's attributes on preference, event engagement, sponsorship enterprise trust and sponsorship enterprise attitude, ultimately constructing a sponsorship effectiveness model.

The survey method was used to examine 238 respondents' emotions and attitudes towards companies participating in sponsoring Olympic mascots.

The study found that the main attributes of the mascot include visual and emotional factors, both of which have a positive impact on preference, with emotional factors having a greater influence than visual factors. Visual and emotional factors indirectly affect engagement through preference. Preference and engagement play a completely mediating role in the effect of mascot attributes on sponsorship enterprise trust and sponsorship enterprise attitude.

This study provides practical recommendations for managers to achieve marketing success in sports sponsorship through mascots.

This paper provides a measurement tool for the study of mascot attributes and important support for subsequent research in sponsorship marketing.

While the Olympic Games are always under the spotlight, the Paralympic Games are somehow ignored. This paper aims to invite the general public to think about the para-athletes and the differential treatments they received.

Among the participating countries, many of them were unable to win a single Olympic or Paralympic medal. When the dependent variable is left-censored, ordinary least squares regression is asymptotically biased downwards. In the literature, researchers typically employ the maximum likelihood Tobit model to take care of the censoring problem. However, some researchers argue that the Hurdle model has an advantage over the Tobit model in identifying the determinants of winning Olympic medals. Following their wisdom, this paper employs both the Tobit and Hurdle models in analysis.

The empirical evidence gathered in this paper suggests that population size, host status and average years of schooling are the big three socio-economic determinants when it comes to winning medals at the Paralympic Games and Olympic Games. The findings support the hypothesis that sports talent is randomly distributed and a large country has a higher chance to have talented athletes or para-athletes winning the Olympic medals. The strong host advantage also showed up in the following Paralympics but was not so strong at the next Olympics.

This paper not only examines the relationship between various social, economic and political factors in determining the success of a nation in the Paralympic Games but also attempts to identify possible non-traditional determinants.

This chapter honors the opportunity I have had to learn with David Maines over the past 35 years. I connect my research on communication and disability, specifically among individuals who are blind and visually impaired, to Maines' discussion of narratives incorporating Rawlins' exploration of similarity and difference. I discuss narratives of disability as difference using three examples: A short story written by H. G. Wells; the American with Disabilities Act; and interviews conducted with elite blind goalball athletes. I conclude with 10 lessons learned about disability and difference including that the goal of my research is to help us all perceive disability as a difference that matters, but not as a difference that disables.

This chapter investigates resistance initiated by trans athletes and their allies and evaluates developments in policies and practices at the international, national and local levels of sport. The limitations of liberal approaches to trans inclusion are identified, and examples of radical, transformative approaches grounded in intersectional feminism are presented, together with an analysis of the crucial roles of solidarity work provided by allies and accomplices. The potential offered by boxing as a route to empowerment for trans and nonbinary participants is examined. An overview of recent media coverage of trans athletes suggests that global resistance is having an important impact on mainstream journalism. Finally, this chapter outlines how a successful campaign challenging a trans-exclusive Sport Canada's 2022 opinion survey and a recent report by Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport provide further evidence of effective resistance to trans exclusion in sport.

Question answering (QA) answers the questions asked by people in the form of natural language. In the QA, due to the subjectivity of users, the questions they query have different expressions, which increases the difficulty of text retrieval. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore new query rewriting method for QA that integrates multiple related questions (RQs) to form an optimal question. Moreover, it is important to generate a new dataset of the original query (OQ) with multiple RQs.

This study collects a new dataset SQuAD_extend by crawling the QA community and uses word-graph to model the collected OQs. Next, Beam search finds the best path to get the best question. To deeply represent the features of the question, pretrained model BERT is used to model sentences.

The experimental results show three outstanding findings. (1) The quality of the answers is better after adding the RQs of the OQs. (2) The word-graph that is used to model the problem and choose the optimal path is conducive to finding the best question. (3) Finally, BERT can deeply characterize the semantics of the exact problem.

The proposed method can use word-graph to construct multiple questions and select the optimal path for rewriting the question, and the quality of answers is better than the baseline. In practice, the research results can help guide users to clarify their query intentions and finally achieve the best answer.

This chapter examines three Italian cities that have experienced a transition from “Fordism to tourism”: Genoa, Turin, and Milan. After an industrial crisis, they have invested in culture and tourism as alternative ways of development. This transition is examined using the theoretical framework of urban regimes highlighting five development trends: the city as a growth machine, the Fordist city, the creative city, the city as entertainment machine, and the blue-green city. By adopting this theoretical framework, the evidence shows how academic institutions, tour operators, and public authorities may or may not work together for the tourism development of their cities.

Although much of the research has examined the positive relationship between memorable tourism experiences (MTEs) and tourist satisfaction, little research has attempted to analyze the double mediating effects of cognitive and affective responses and the moderating effects of tourism motivation on the relationship. To address these gaps, this study developed a theoretical framework including MTEs, cognitive response, affective response, tourism motivation and tourist satisfaction with golf tourism using a stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory.

The author collected data from domestic and international tourists that attended amateur golf tournaments for non-commercial purposes as amateur athletes in Jeju and Gunsan, South Korea, in 2022. Construct validity of the measurement scale was verified by confirmatory factor analysis, factor loadings, average variance extracted and construct reliability. The reliability of the measurement scale was verified by Cronbach's analysis. The current study utilizes structural equation modeling with maximum likelihood estimation to analyze the positive relationships and double mediating effects. Jamovi statistical software was also used to conduct a moderation analysis.

The findings displayed the significant impacts of MTEs on cognitive response, affective response, and tourist satisfaction, and the positive impacts of cognitive response and affective response on tourist satisfaction. Moreover, cognitive and affective responses were found to partially mediate the aforementioned relationships and golf tourism motivation moderated the aforementioned paths.

The current study shows that there is a double mediating role of the cognitive and affective responses and moderating role of tourism motivation on the relationship between MTEs and tourist satisfaction and explores golf tourists who participate in an amateur golf tournament for non-commercial purposes as amateur athletes, which has largely been ignored in golf tourism research.

This study investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the sustainability of sports business models by means of a specific case analysis, conducted on M-I Stadio S.r.l., the service management firm that provides all types of backstage activities related to football matches performed at San Siro Stadium in Italy.

Building on interviews on its management team's direct experience and on archival data, the authors depict the consequences of the pandemic in terms of corporate governance, accounting choices and overall strategic business development through information triangulation from a forward-looking perspective.

Complying with restrictions, M-I Stadio S.r.l. preserved its financial position by embracing digitalization, increasing information flows with partners and adopting a risk aversion behaviour. Overall, results indicate that the pandemic played a catalyst role in the transformation process of the football industry. Moreover, apart from the physical and virtual merge acceleration, well-being for athletes, society and the planet, transcending the gaming part of sports activities has also been taking place. The study also illustrates the foreseeable developments of sustainable sport management practices from a critical perspective.

Since the San Siro Stadium management company might represent one of the forefront companies, within the sports industry, this study results should be conveniently taken into consideration by sporting authorities and international bodies, emphasizing the relevance of sustainability (i.e. environmental and social practices within the sports industry) and digitalization so as to better prepare sports organizations and to provide the overall industry with the tools deemed necessary to navigate this important transition in a smoother way.

Given the great tourist attractiveness of Spain at international level, tourism has become one of the main sources of income and employment, as well as a basic pillar of the Spanish economy. With these ideas in mind, this paper aims to study how the different promotion strategies implemented in the industry have influenced the evolution of tourism in Spain since the early 20th century.

The research is a general review, providing a historical examination of the diverse promotion strategies deployed in the tourism industry in Spain over the past decades. It focuses on the descriptive approach of these strategies and their implications throughout the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.

The findings reveal a shift in recent years from strategies focused on Marketing 1.0 to strategies that, apart from being centered on consumer values (therefore, Marketing 3.0), are beginning to rely to a greater extent on information and communication technologies (ICT) and sustainability, more in line with the more recent Marketing 4.0 and even Marketing 5.0.

This work has many implications for the management of public and private operators in the industry, including the need to incorporate the latest marketing trends – most notably the advances in ICT and sustainability.

The study offers an in-depth understanding of how marketing strategies have been used in the tourism sector in Spain from the end of the 19th century to the present day, which is highly original compared to previous studies.

The impact of various factors on how TV sports audiences perceive sport event sponsors’ billboards around sports facilities has been the subject of extensive research. Despite numerous factors that impact the effectiveness of sponsor signage at sporting events, there has been a lack of research regarding the language used for such signage around sports facilities’ billboards. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the effects of billboard advertisement language on TV sports audiences’ recognition, recall and search intention to sponsor signage.

This study employed an online experimental design. Participants (n = 925) were recruited from two linguistically different regions: Chinese and English. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: watching tennis video matches with billboard advertisements presented in either the Roman alphabet exclusively or in a combination of the Roman alphabet and Chinese characters.

This study revealed that although language cannot significantly impact audiences’ unaided recall of a brand, it does have a discernible effect on brand recognition and search intention among audiences. Additionally, people are more likely to search for brands in their native language. Participants from various regions tend to have different recognition rates and search intentions for sport sponsors.

This is the first manuscript examining the use of different languages in relation to audiences’ recognition and recall of sports sponsorship. It provides empirical evidence of the importance of carefully considering the language used in sponsor signage around stadium billboards to optimize the efficacy of sponsorships at sports events.