ABSTRACT
Introduction Sport tourism integrates the separate but overlapping concepts of sport and tourism. As defined by sport tourism consultant Joy Standeven and professor Paul DeKnop, sport tourism includes “All forms of active and passive involvement in sporting activity, participated in casually or in an organized way for noncommercial or business/commercial reasons, that necessitate travel away from home and work locality.”1 Standeven and DeKnop further clarify that active sport tourists are a category of sport tourism where participants seek sport during travel as a primary goal or as an incidental part of the overall excursion, whereas, in comparison, passive sport tourists are observers who similarly may have the activity serve as a primary travel influence or secondary occurrence.2 Although the origins of sport tourism have been traced to the first recorded ancient Olympic Games in 776 BCE, discussions today tend to delimit the conversation to coincide with the transportation innovations that resulted in mass tourism.3 This boundary is reasonable when considering the history of sport tourism in America.
