ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sports Act. Living
Sec. Sport, Leisure, Tourism, and Events
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fspor.2025.1605544
This article is part of the Research TopicExploring the Dynamics of Medium and Small Scale Sport Events: Implications for Communities and DevelopmentView all 5 articles
Are we able to have sustainable winter sports events? Main challenges and future directions
Provisionally accepted
- 1Faculty of Management, Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland
- 2Lunex and Luxembourg Health & Sport Institute A.s.b.l., Luxembourg, Differdange, Luxembourg
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The main purpose of this manuscript is to identify and classify challenges and best practices for organizing sustainable winter sports events. The paper has three sub-goals: 1. What are the most significant challenges for winter sport organizers (WSO, non-mega event organizers)? 2. Is importance of WSO challenges impacted by their willingness to implement sustainability practices ? 3. Identify most common best practices and answer which of them address main problems and which problems still need to be covered? The methodology used in this work is based on two step research; 1) scoping review and 2) questionnaire. 1st step is focused on reviewing studies on practices and policies in winter sports events concerning sustainability. This review aims to understand the current state of knowledge and experiences of winter sports organizers and stakeholders. Review includes existing literature, secondary data sources. Survey data were collected with relevant stakeholders. Sampling for surveys is based on snowball sampling. An important part of the survey involved collecting feedback and considerations from sport clubs and federations about their experiences with winter sports events and their approaches to sustainability. Survey results were analysed by regressions and descriptive statistics. Based on the research, we observed two distinct perspectives in the sector. One comes from policymakers and international associations, which push for new standards, frameworks, and recommendations for a sustainable approach to winter sports. The other perspective comes from grassroots winter sports event organizers, such as amateur sports clubs and infrastructure owners. In their opinion, sustainability is not yet their main concern. They identified key challenges in the survey as financial resources and stability, infrastructure, weather conditions, public-private partnerships and natural resource usage. So the problem appears to be a disconnect between policymakers and smaller organizations in the sector.
Keywords: governance, sustainability, Management, event, winter, Sport
Received: 03 Apr 2025; Accepted: 25 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Perechuda. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Igor Perechuda, igor.perechuda@gmail.com
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