ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses several perspectives relating to the promotion, marketing, and empirical analysis of large-scale Masters sport events. It presents research or conceptual notions that appear to apply uniquely to masters athletes (MAs), and attempts to merge recent findings on MAs from the domain of social-psychology of sport with pertinent themes in sport marketing and event promotion. The chapter reviews three of the events – the World Masters Games, The FINA World Masters Championships, and the World Masters Athletics Championship, by describing the nature of the event, the scope of participation, and anecdotal evidence supporting each event's impact. It proposes that certain legacy outcomes are age-related – that is, changes in aging conceptions and what people think is possible in aging. Such outcomes may be particularly unique to large-scale Masters events compared to more familiar mega-events. The chapter suggests methods by which researchers may seek empirical evidence supporting these changes in the wake of large-scale Masters events.
