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semi-official pronouncements), as well as the govern-ment’s flagship Youth Sport Strategy. One is that young people are playing less sport; the other is that the Olym-pics can somehow reverse this. Both of these assumptions are simply false. They run counter to the available evidence – much of which, ironically, comes from government-funded sources. Here I shall present the evidence.

Crisis in participation?

The first assumption is that there is some kind of crisis in sports participation in England, especially among the young.

Jeremy Hunt and those around him can, indeed, point to a small (but statistically significant) downturn in sports participation among young people in recent years. The key phrase, however, is “in recent years”. Over any time period but the very shortest, the trend has been stable or upwards – and in generational terms could even be considered phenomenal. More people – and more young people – are doing more sport and physical recreation than ever before.

In 1960, the Wolfenden Report2 revealed a wide-spread drop-out from sport among youngsters after

London 2012 and sports participation:

The myths of legacy

The 2012 London Olympic Games have provided an ideal opportunity for government and its agencies to make bold statements. There is, they say, a crisis in par-ticipation in sport. Young people are playing less sport than ever before. It is received wisdom, and much has been made of it; it is often related to the ostensible rise in lifestyle-related diseases such as heart attacks and stroke. Happily, ministers have produced strategies for tackling the issue. In January, the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt1, announced a new Youth Sport Strategy. It is “designed to create a sporting habit for life amongst young people.” He added: “This Government is committed to creating a lasting sporting legacy from the Olympic and Paralym-pic Games … to inspire a new generation and create a deep and lasting legacy of sports participation in every community.” He gave a rationale for this renewed at-tempt to reinvigorate sports participation among young and old alike: “Since 2005 when we won the bid to stage the Games, participation rates in sport in England have fallen, particularly amongst young people. Our new ap-proach aims to arrest this decline”.

Two main assumptions underpin the ministe-rial statement (and, for that matter, a host of official and

Today’s young people play far less sport than before. Or do they? The evidence, says Ken Green, shows quite the reverse. We have been promised “a deep and lasting legacy” from the Olympics. The evidence shows the Olympic sports model to be irrelevant to youth participation. Have we a misguided response to a fictitious illness?

Young people are playing less sport. The Olympics will change this. Both these statements are untrue

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the end of compulsory schooling in the late 1950s, with only a small minority returning to sport, usually team sports, in their late teens. Similarly, Emmett’s 1971 study3 demonstrated that sports participation remained extremely low – far lower than any subsequent levels – throughout the 1960s: few girls did any sport regularly in those years, while among boys football was the only sport that involved substantial numbers, and most ceased playing organised football soon after they left school. From the early 1980s onwards that began to change. Studies by various government agencies highlighted a clear trend towards increased participation among young people and adults inthe UK. This was admittedly against the relatively low threshold of at least one sporting effort per month, but the trend was undoubtedly upward. Three separate studies4–6 all reported this trend. Thus, since the 1960s there has been a demonstrably marked decline in the drop-out rate during late

adolescence, and young people have been much more likely to continue participating in sport and physical recreation after completing their full-time education7.

By the late 1990s and the early years of this century Sport England5 were able to re-port that ‘fewer youngsters [were] spending less than one hour, or no time, in a week doing sport and exercise than was the case in 1994’. Eighty per cent of secondary age youngsters were spending more than one hour a week on sport and exercise [excluding school physical exercises classes] and 40% were spending five hours or more on sport5. A decade on, Sport England investigated again: their 2011 Active People Survey (APS5) revealed that levels of participation of once a month or more (and for many, once per week) have been stable at around 40% of the adult population in Eng-land throughout the 2000s8. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s Taking Part in Sport study9 revealed that, in 2010, over half

(53%) of adults had done active sport in the last four weeks (excluding ‘utility cycling’, for example – cycling for the purpose of com-muting to work – though it might seem that cycling to work is at least as beneficial for health as any other kind of cycling, not least because it takes place twice a day, five days a week); between 2005/06 and 2009/10 the proportion of adults doing active sport for more than 30 minutes at a time increased from 50% to 53%. At the same time, nearly a quarter (24%) of adults did something actively sport-ing on 11–28 days within a four week period and almost 7% did so every day. In a similar vein, the APS5 study8 reveals increases in the numbers of people participating in sport three times a week or more for 30 minutes at moder-ate intensity during the 2010/11 period: 6.927 million adults (aged 16 and over) – 111 800 more than in 2007/08 (6.815 million) and approximately 632 000 more than in 2005/06 (6.295 million).

How it used to be: Bobby Charlton of Manchester United leads local children to kick a ball in the back lane of his home in Ashington , Northumberland, ca 1958. TopFoto

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Whichever way one looks at the evidence, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that, when viewed over a longer span than a few years, sports participation has become far more central to the leisure lifestyles of children, youth and adults in England. Jeremy Hunt’s claim that since 2005 participation rates in sport in England have fallen, particularly among young people, is, at the very least, disin-genuous. It is true that, while remaining stable during the 1990s, youth participation declined somewhat in the early 2000s and then oscil-lated throughout the rest of that decade. The Taking Part Survey 2010–11 revealed10, for example, that between 2005/06 and 2010/11, the proportion of 16–24-year-olds who had taken part in active sport at least once in the last four weeks decreased from 77% to 72%. Nevertheless, just under three-quarters (72%) of 16–24-year-olds took part at least once per month, just over one-half (56%) took part at least once per week in moderately active sport, and over a third (39%) took part three times per week or more. Once again, when compared to the 1950s and 1960s these figures represent substantial increases. We live in a culture that does far more sport than it used to. The stereo-type of a young generation of couch potatoes who never indulge in sport or exercise is belied by the evidence.

Legacy of London?

The second assumption revolves around the role-modelling effect believed to be inherent in sporting events such as the Olympics. It concerns the purported “Olympic legacy”. Se-bastian Coe, Chairman of London 2012, has predicted that a “lasting legacy” of the Olympics will be its ability to inspire future generations to play sport: “The greatest tool you have is a well-stocked shop window” in which “[i]t will be the performance of the stars in the Games that gets people involved. You drive participa-tion off role models.” So will young people take up Olympic sports in droves?

Role models, especially in the form of highly visible elite sportsmen and women, are often portrayed as significant in shaping young people’s inclinations towards sport; so Coe’s view is nothing new. The impact of role models on young people’s participation is often misun-derstood, however, and frequently overstated.

Competitors at Olympic Games are often-cited examples: their enthusiasm for sport and the rewards their involvement can bring them

are believed to inspire young people, increas-ing their commitment to and participation in sport. But a study by Stamatakis and Chaud-hury11 of the decade to 2006 suggests a differ-ent outcome. Their findings support an earlier study12 of participation immediately before the successful London bid in 2005 and one year immediately after it – and also, they might have added, two years after the Athens Olym-pic Games (2004) in which Britain achieved notable successes in cycling and rowing. They found that far from indicating an increase, “par-ticipation in major Olympic sports (swimming, cycling, running and team and racquet sports) … showed signs of decrease”. This was particu-larly true of young men, the population group that is most likely to adopt role models from the world of sports. In the same vein, Houlihan

et al.13 cited the University of Toronto Centre for Sport Policy Studies’ exploration of the “inspiration myth” (which persists in the face of evidence) “which suggests that there is little or no significant correlation between Olympic success and changes in levels of mass participa-tion in sport”. All in all, it seems that the young people most likely to view top-level sportsmen and women as role models to be imitated are those who already perceive themselves as being on a similar trajectory in the same sports as the role models themselves. Even then, young and aspiring elite sportspeople tend to be discern-ing in their choice of characteristics they seek to emulate. Young elite rugby league players, for example, “admire the technical competence, physical characteristics and temperament”14 of elite players rather than other aspects of their

How it is now: more children play more sport. © iStockphoto.com/Christopher Futcher

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general lifestyles and behaviours. (In view of the boorish behaviour of the England rugby team in New Zealand in September 2011, we should perhaps congratulate the young on their discrimination, as well as for their participation in sport.)

Beyond aspiring young sportsmen and women, young people generally are unlikely to model the sporting behaviours of the “stars”. Vescio et al.15 demonstrate how young people have difficulty identifying with sporting stars that may appear, at the very least, several steps removed from them. Consequently, elite sports men and women are unlikely to be viewed as meaningful role models by young people. This is because the significance of role models lies not in their sporting and cultural status per se. Instead, it stems from their relationship with, and proximity to, young people. Youngsters are far more likely to be influenced by those culturally and geographically closer to them, and who are, or at least were, similar to them at one point in their lives. Consequently, the “aspirational model” – focusing attention on those who young people may realistically as-pire and/or expect to be like – appears a much better bet than the “elite model”16: the sports participation of friends and peer groups and, for that matter, parents and family members is what matters. In contrast, for many young people, even their school sports teachers are of limited significance, sporting heroes and hero-ines even less. All things considered, it seems that the most effective sporting role models for young people lie far closer to home than is commonly assumed in the rhetoric surround-ing sporting “stars”.

We are also confronted with the mis-match between Olympic sports and the sports that young people have increasingly favoured over the past 30 years or so. The overall growth in participation from the 1980s onwards included a rapid diversification and broaden-ing in forms of participation. We have seen a movement indoors, a decline in team and partner sports, and, in particular, increases in (young) women’s participation. A particular feature of this broadening and diversification among young people has been a shift towards so-called “lifestyle sports”: activities that are characterized as being non-competitive, or at least less competitive than traditional sports. They are more recreational in nature, they are flexible, they are individual or small-group activities that can, in effect, be participated in however people want, with whom they want

and when they want, very often with a health and fitness orientation17. Yoga, keep-fit, and zumba dance classes flourish and grow; so do jogging, fun-runs, walking and hill-climbing. Hurdling, javelin, pole-vault and shot-put do not, and remain extreme minority occupations.

The trend among young people towards lifestyle sports begs questions, therefore, about the likely efficacy of the Olympics in encour-aging them to be more involved in sport. No-where is this better illustrated than in Sport England’s key strategic target: their 2009–13 Whole Sport Plans aim to reduce the drop-off in participation during youth in what they re-fer to as “nine key sports”. These nine sports are badminton, basketball, football, gymnastics,

hockey, netball, rugby league, rugby union and tennis. Sport England is funding all of them, and for all of them growth targets in partici-pation have been set. However, in the period between 2007/08 and 2010/11, once-a-week participation among 18-year-olds across the nine drop-off sports decreased from 189 100 (28%) to 172 500 (27%): a decrease of 16 6008.

All in all, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that government policy and pro-nouncements on the supposed crisis of sports participation continue to amount to what Roberts7, almost two decades ago, described as a misguided response to a fictitious illness. In the process, they demonstrate the vulnerability of sport, and of school physical education, for that matter, to politicians keen to ‘grandstand’.

References1. Hunt, J. (2012) Written Ministe-

rial Statement: Youth Sport Strategy – Creating a Sporting Habit for Life. January 10th. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201212/cmhansrd/cm120110/wmstext/120110m0001.htm.

2. Central Council for Physical Recreation (1960) Sport and the Community. The Report of the Wolfenden Committee on Sport. London: CCPR.

3. Emmett, I. (1971) Youth and Leisure in an Urban Sprawl. Manchester: Manchester University

Press.4. Sport England/UK Sport (2001) Gen-

eral Household Survey: Participation in Sport – Past Trends and Future Prospects. London: Sport Eng-land/UK Sport.

5. Sport England (2003) Young People and Sport in England, 1994–2002. London: Sport England.

6. Fox, K. and Rickards, L. (2004) Sport and Leisure. Results from the 2002 General Household Survey. London: The Stationary Office.

7. Roberts, K. (1996) Young people, schools, sport and government policy. Sport, Education and Society, 1(1), 47–57.

8. Sport England (2011) Active People Sur-vey 5. London: Sport England.

9. Department for Culture, Media and Sport (2010) Taking Part Survey 2009–10: Sport and Physical Recreation. London: DCMS.

10. Department for Culture, Media and Sport (2011) Taking Part Survey 2010–11: Sport and Physical Recreation. London: DCMS.

11. Stamatakis, E. and Chaudhury, M. (2008) Temporal trends in adults’ sports participation patterns in England between 1997 and 2006: The Health Survey for England. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 42, 601–608.

12. Coalter, F. (2004) Stuck in the blocks? A sustainable sporting legacy. In A. Vigor, M. Mean and C. Tims (eds), After the Goldrush. A Sustainable Olympics for London. London: Institute for Public Policy Research and DEMOS.

13. Houlihan, B., Bloyce, D. and Smith, A. (2009) Editorial: Developing the research agenda in sport policy. International Journal of Sport Policy, 1(1), 1–12.

14. Fleming, S., Hardman, A., Jones, C. and Sheridan, H. (2005) “Role models” among elite young male rugby league players in Britain. Euro-pean Physical Education Review, 11(1), 51–70.

15. Vescio, J., Wilde, K. and Crosswhite, J. (2005) Profiling sport role models to enhance initiatives for adolescent girls in physical education and sport., European Physical Education Review, 11(2), 153–170.

16. Coalter, F. (2006) Sport-in-development: monitoring and evaluation: accountability or development? Paper presented at Researching Youth Sport: Diverse Perspectives. Institute of Youth Sport/Institute of Sport Policy Conference, Loughborough University, September 20th.

17. Coalter, F. (1996) Trends in sports par-ticipation. Position Paper Prepared for the Sports Council. Institute for Leisure and Amenity Man-agement annual conference, Birmingham.

Ken Green is Professor of Applied Sociology of Sport at the Centre for Research in Sport and Society at Chester University, and Professor in Physical Education at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences. He is editor of the European Physical Education Review.

Non-competitive jogging, fun-runs, hill-walking, yoga and dance flourish; hurdling, javelin and pole-vault do not