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The purpose of this paper is to examine the 2015 Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) Road World Cycling Championship in Richmond, Virginia.

An array of eclectic methods included in situ witness observations of several of the races, 21 semi-structured random interviews and multiple discussions with elements of UCI, the city of Richmond’s planners, residents and business owners during and after the championship in fall 2015.

This paper has uncovered five findings: First, the material investment was considerably smaller than that of other events (common good criterion CGC i – good governance); second, pre-planning was critical to successfully hosting the event; third, this event included not only two entities as one would expect at first glance, but many (common good criterion CGC ii – good management); fourth, a filière approach to community service and the exploitation of clustered thematic activities was of critical importance to successfully hosting the 2015 UCI Road World Cycling Championship; and fifth, this event enabled the opportunity to market other city and regional assets (common good criterion CGC iii – good outcomes).

Cities hoping to bid for events ought to consider hosting unique events such as road championships. Those cities will benefit from careful event pre-planning, responsible event hosting and post-event legacies in the form of socio-economic and mindscape memories.

Bidding and pre-event planning is increasingly seen as an opportunity to locate, create and develop support for common good urban projects, which will remain valuable after the event is over or which will need to be built in spite of the bid’s result.

This study fills an unresearched gap on the impact of events on a city’s future non-motorized sustainable transportation priorities.

This paper sought to determine how a major sport event can become trapped in a winner's curse, in which the fierce competition to host the event forces organisers to spend more on acquiring and hosting it than what it is worth in economic terms.

This study used a combination of document analysis and 47 in-depth interviews with 51 individuals representing various private and public organisations involved in the implementation of the UCI 2017 Road Cycling World Championship. Snowball sampling and a semi-structured interview guide were used to ensure coverage of all relevant information.

The organiser and the host municipal lacked the necessary experience with events of this size and character. Information from previous championships events was not transferred, and the municipality administration did not utilise experiences from hosting previous events. Limited financial resources prevented the organiser from hiring enough employees with the necessary competence. Lack of communication between the stakeholders who contributed in hosting the event reduced the quality of planning and preparations. A dubious culture and lack of seriousness within the Norwegian Cycling Federation, which was the owner of organising company, seemed to have been transferred to organiser.

The research identifies some of the reasons why major sports events so often turns out to be more problematic than expected in economic terms, not only for the organiser but also for actors in the public sector in the host city. The novelty is that it goes into depth on the underlying reasons and the dynamic forces behind these problems.

This study analyses the impact of institutional logics on the outcomes of a sporting event's risk process.

The research design is an exploratory case study of the 2017 Road World Cycling Championship using a qualitative approach. By drawing on multiple sources, documents and experiences of six key stakeholders the richness of the qualitative data were utilised to provide a deeper understanding of the impact of institutional logics on the process.

Stakeholders relied on different organisational and professional logics in arguments for certain risk preferences and strategies. Further, the logics behind stakeholder attention varied between stakeholder groups and within a stakeholder group. This led to a tension-filled relationship amongst stakeholders working in the same organisation and between those in different organisations. Finally, new professional practices emerged; however, there were also unintended consequences, such as a large financial deficit, with a significant part of the cost overrun being the risk assessment work.

The study includes a case study of a major sporting event that was arranged some years ago. Events are usually organised as temporary projects in collaboration with public sector organisations and must be arranged in accordance with the logics of efficiency as well as meeting the particular needs of citizens. Assuming similar risk planning processes may occur in other contexts is reasonable.

The study contributes to knowledge about the impact of logics on the outcome of risk planning and improves scholars' understanding of risk management and the outcomes of planning mega-sporting events. Moreover, insights into these micro-level processes reveal the importance of dealing with the logics that lie beneath stakeholders' perceptions of risk in order to collaborate, achieve common goals, and prevent cost overruns.

The sport events are very different for the people involved in the meeting (foreigners or national, regional, or local people) and the locations and now are in very crisis. After a review of literature on the effects of sport events, the chapter would suggest how to take into account sporting events after COVID-19. In this context, the chapter is aimed to assessing to impact the destinations through the methodology of case study. The research focused particularly on the project of the Italian Golf Federation for the organization of the Ryder Cup 2022 and assumed the economic, social, and environmental effects of this event on tourist system of local and regional scale. The golf events, nevertheless, can be easier to organize than other sporting events that take place, for example, in arenas and with great public access. The golf events, in fact, can involve a single person during the game and can play on air and be a great encouragement to promote local sustainable development (Fyall & Jago, 2007). The chapter, at least, is aimed to suggest the new policy to implement sport events to promote a new form of tourism, offering new incentives for local sustainable development of regional community, including all the participants to the events.

Professional road cycling has the capacity to be a major worldwide spectator sport, but has yet, in the eyes of many, failed to realize its full potential. There is a growing awareness that profound reforms are crucial for the sport’s future success. The purpose of this paper is to explore the conditions which the sport must address, and define a new business model for professional road cycling.

The paper uses qualitative data to screen professional road cycling’s current business model, and to present a coherent vision on the changes needed to reform the sport. Information was gathered from archival material and from talks with stakeholders.

The paper presents a blueprint for the future of professional cycling. It identifies 6 vital building blocks and 25 specific action points, beginning with the idea that professional road cycling needs a stable business model that produces a valuable core product.

Professional road cycling is is conservative by nature and changes are extremely difficult to implement. This contribution presents a glimpse of one possible future for professional cycling, if cycling’s policy makers acknowledge the need for profound reforms of the sport and are willing to make the necessary changes.

To explore the sociology of sport-related pain through an autoethnographic focus on the contiguous, 20-year participation of one professional athlete at the Ironman Triathlon World Championships in Kona, Hawaii; to address the “well heeded, long-standing and vociferous calls ‘to bring the body back in to social theory’” (Hockey & Collinson, 2007, p. 2) by allowing authorial reflection on the negotiations of pain during those decades of elite competition.

Negotiated sports pain is explored as the subject/author allows visceral memory over a two-decade arc of professional-level participation at the Ironman. The ethnographic study is a combination of self-reflection, phenomenology, supportive and correlative theory, and detailed peripheral aspects of one elite athlete as he discusses the roles, levels, types, applications, and meanings of pain during the training and racing of the Ironman Triathlon World Championships. Allowances are made for reflective and subjective narratives in service of introducing sensorial elements to this area of the sociology of pain.

This chapter addresses several calls for a focus on the “practical experiences of the body” (Wainwright & Turner, 2006, p. 238) or what Hockey and Collinson (2007) call the “lacking (of) a more ‘fleshy’ perspective, a ‘carnal sociology’ (Crossley, 1995) of sport.” The details provided by the author/athlete offer a more personal and intimate view of how sports pain is negotiated over the arc of two decades of high-level competition. A sometimes brutally honest and objective self-reflection reveals the inner workings of a professional athlete turned college professor as he reflects on the multiplicity of roles that pain served and played during his 20 years at the Ironman World Triathlon Championships.

With a dearth of “embodied” studies on the sociology of sports-related pain, particularly by elite athletes who lived much of their youth in a physical culture that requires the near-constant negotiation of pain, this chapter provides a deep inside-out look at one case with its sensorial, phenomenological, and temporal insight to pain management.

Women's sport is said to be experiencing a moment of progress exemplified by the ‘professionalising’ of teams, leagues and events (McLachlan, 2019; Pavlidis, 2020; Taylor et al., 2020). The current ‘professionalising’ moment is celebrated as a measure of incremental change that demonstrates that women's sport is progressing in the right direction (Sherry & Taylor, 2019; Taylor, 2020). In this chapter, we pursue critical questions of progress in relation to professionalisation in women's road cycling. Cycling as a sport commenced in the late 1800s, and women were able to earn money from riding and racing their bicycle. However, the evolution of women's cycling has not been a linear process, (McLachlan, 2016) and despite increased ‘professionalisation’ of women's road cycling, women cyclists lack proper wages, safe working conditions, significant prize money, and suitable economic and career opportunities. Our work draws from data of 15 semi-structured interviews with riders and from extensive fieldwork of elite women's road cycling races in seven different countries in 2019. Our findings illustrate that despite the general perceptions of progress of women's professional road cycling, the cyclists' experiences and rationalisations of their conditions reflect deeper struggles. We argue that struggles over rewards, resources, and recognition are all evidence of the ‘unimpeded sexism’ in sport (Fink, 2016, p. 3), and as such, the professionalising of women's sport does not guarantee transformation of the gender order.

The aim of this paper is to examine marketing practices within the bicycle industry.

The paper utilizes both primary and secondary sources to provide a retrospective analysis of marketing strategy at the largest Italian bicycle company.

The paper explains how marketing works at the Bianchi company and provides a detailed analysis of how it built its brand identity over time.

Very few primary sources were available. There was neither a company archive nor other archives. For the most part, the paper is based on secondary sources.

The paper tries to fill the gap in current marketing literature that usually neglects the bicycle as a relevant topic, despite bicycle companies being a predecessor to the automobile industry. Moreover, the paper demonstrates that bicycle companies developed a rather sophisticated approach to marketing that is still in use.

This study seeks to examine how a sport league, a unique feature of professional sport, influences the business‐to‐business marketing of teams participating in the sport league.

This study uses a qualitative research design based on a single case study, the UCI ProTour in professional road cycling. The primary sources consist of 27 semi‐structured interviews complemented by written sources and controlled for construct validity, external validity and reliability.

From a theoretical point of view, a sport league is a marketing channel network (a specific type of an intentionally developed business network or IDBN). Theoretical analysis also reveals that the teams' business‐to‐business marketing is positively related to the network's value‐creating system. Empirically, it is argued that the introduction of a marketing channel network has a positive influence on the financial value of the teams' business‐to‐business market but does not result in a change in the business demographics of corporate sponsors.

The study has possible sport‐specific limitations.

Business‐to‐business marketers and sport league managers should pay attention to the characteristics of the sport league as these influence the teams' business‐to‐business market. This is especially valid for sports in which teams rely strongly on sport sponsoring and, to a lesser extend, on gate revenues, television rights and prize money.

For the first time, this study examines and provides data on the business‐to‐business environment of teams in professional road cycling. It contributes to the literature of international sport marketing and professional road cycling, a sport gaining momentum in various countries and which is understudied in comparison to other sports.

Reto Rupf‐Haller presented the case of the environmental planning process adopted by the St‐Moritz region (Suisse) for the organisation of the FIS Alpine World Skiing Championships in 2003. The race slopes of the championships are situated in an ecologically sensitive area above the forest‐line.