Introduction to the Special Issue Active Sport Tourism

When scholarly and industry interest turned to sport tourism in the 1990s, there was some consensus on the existence of two types of tourism associated with sport: active and passive (Standeven & De Knop, 1999). Active sport tourism was associated with participating in sport while on holiday/vacation. It encompassed golf and skiing, as well as other forms of ‘taking part’, including participating in organized running and cycling events, and physical activities that crossed into adventure tourism such as hiking and canoeing. Passive or event sport tourism, on the other hand, referred to tourism associated with spectating at sport events from the Olympic Games, through to regular season football matches. The key difference between the two forms of tourism was in the behavior of physically taking part as an ‘athlete’ or watching as a ‘fan’.