ABSTRACT
The outcome of the different rates of adoption of sport, local tradition, alternative opportunities and other factors have produced a set of global, national and regional mosaics of sporting practice. In short, on a variety of scales sporting practices display marked spatial variations. There is a long tradition of exploring these variations, dating back, indirectly, to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. By mid-century studies of the regional differences in sporting practice were quite common, and by the 1970s and 1980s such approaches were the most frequently found of sports geographic studies. They remain popular today, especially in the USA. This chapter seeks to provide an overview of approaches to studying regional differences in sporting attributes. Perhaps the most common approach has been to explore geographic variations in the ‘production’ of superior athletes and it is this that will form the main focus of this chapter.
