David Fleischman

The Brisbane 2032 Olympics and Paralympics signal a shift from mega-city hosts to a more regional and sustainable approach to staging the Games. Uniquely in a Summer Olympic bid, Brisbane’s application was based on the hosts being from the broader Australian region of south-east Queensland. In appointing Brisbane, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach outlined the importance of sustainability and economic responsibility, and recognised the long-term regional and national strategies around development in Australia. In this changing global sports ecosystem, this paper examines the legacies of Atlanta 1996, a smaller-scale Olympics through media coverage of this edition of the Games, including general and sports reporting. The findings outline areas for the Brisbane 2032 organisers to consider in delivering an Olympics that is sustainable for the hosts. The Games were most effective for fulfilling elements related to sports legacies and the economic focus on making a profit, or not requiring government funding. There are considerable positives in the Olympic stadium still being in use, along with the aquatic centre, and the continued popularity of the public space and broader developments based around the Centennial Olympic Park.

Encouraging clinical trial participation remains a critical endeavour despite sustained efforts. This research aims to introduce a novel approach to promoting clinical trial participation, leveraging existing participants as advocates for others to participate. The study analysed 166 survey responses from Australian clinical trial participants. The results demonstrate that enhanced rapport between clinical trial participants and trial staff and technical quality are significantly associated with increased advocacy among current trial participants. Additionally, potential variations in these relationships concerning trial type, participant age, and sex are explored. This research on health marketing suggests that strategies for recruiting new participants should leverage patient advocacy, which is fostered by strong patient-staff rapport and perceived technical quality. Significant health marketing implications emerge, indicating that campaigns and trial experiences must be tailored to account for variations in how rapport and technical quality influence advocacy, based on factors such as patient sex, age, and trial type.

Female athletes have often been the targets of offensive comments on digital platforms and incivility, trolling and hate speech were again present during the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. In this sometimes-toxic environment, it is important to understand what is occurring during such a prestigious global tournament so organizations and platforms recognize the degree of abuse – and consider how to address it. In this study, Twitter posts (n = 294,785) were examined in a quantitative content analysis for swearing, rude and derogatory words, and manually filtered into 700 cases where offensive comments were evident. The findings outline types and topics of trolling and highlight how these elements were expressed during the 2023 World Cup, with females the main targets, often by male perpetrators. Broader implications of this work show the need to find ways to address hostility online towards women in sport.

Growing reports indicate a slowdown in electric vehicle (EV) sales, particularly among consumers yet to embrace this sustainable transportation option. A key functional barrier to adopting EVs relates to infrastructure, maintenance, and range anxiety issues. This study explores how marketing can address this barrier by framing messages to evoke anticipated pride in owning an EV, thus reducing range anxiety, charging inconvenience, and ultimately increasing purchase intentions. Grounded in construal level theory and affect-as-information theory, the study employs an online experiment with 223 Australian consumers yet to purchase an EV. Results reveal that concrete, self-targeted messages yield greater purchase intentions, driven by increased anticipated pride in ownership and reduced perceived functional barriers. These findings underscore the importance of framing in marketing messaging to encourage EV adoption and offer practical implications for EV brands and policymakers.

This article examines Cricket Australia’s (CA) Code of Conduct and draws theoretical connections to Enterprise Risk Management (ERM). In so doing, the article considers the nature and scope of CA’s Code of Conduct, and challenges for the effective implementation of the code. The purpose of a Code of Conduct is to set out expectations for behaviour and disciplinary processes for failure to adhere to these standards. However, while public image and popularity remain central objectives of the Code, there is ambiguity and conflict between these objectives and the third objective: integrity, an ethical value that underpins codes of conduct. Our recommendation to remove public image and popularity from the purpose of the Code of Conduct is consistent with The Ethics Centre 2018 Report that recommended a ‘core consistency (a clear ‘family resemblance’) between How We Play, the Spirit of Cricket, and any additional Ethical Framework applying to elite players’. We suggest that ‘core consistency’ starts with a clear and consistent purpose in the Code of Conduct, one that is not clouded by public image and popularity, and one that is focused on the ethical values of integrity, transparency, and accountability.

Research question
This study is a systematic literature review of career transition in high-performance sport, paving the way for sport management research to further a comprehensive advancement of this field in addressing ever-evolving athlete needs. The current review addresses gaps in the literature by synthesising the conceptual evolution of career transition literature and terminology, identifying the focus of career assistance programs (CAPs) and similar support programmes, and investigating trends in the theories, frameworks and models examining elite athlete career transition.

Research methods
Following the PRISMA guidelines, 151 peer-reviewed articles from 1990 through the end of 2023 were systematically identified and analysed.

Results and Findings
A clear conceptual shift from retirement to career transition is observed, with a strong focus on education pathways and terminology. Findings also show a strong education focus and a lack of assessing CAPS. The theoretical basis for career transition work is generally limited, with existing research drawing heavily from various psychological-based lenses.

Implications
This research contributes a comprehensive roadmap to advance research on managing athletes’ successful transition into life beyond sport. It offers fruitful avenues for managing the evolution of career transition and how sport management perspectives may help better assess CAPs. It showcases the potential of sport management knowledge as a fresh lens to investigate career transition in high-performance sport.

Research question: Talent transfer, an accelerated sport pathway to expertise, holds considerable appeal for sports organisations. As an emerging area of academic research across a range of sport disciplines, there is opportunity for to advance knowledge and practice. This review aimed to (a) explore how talent transfer has been defined, to develop a synthesised definition; (b) systematically identify the factors that influence talent transfer; and (c) investigate how theory underpins and enhances understanding of talent transfer.

Research methods: A systematic review was conducted of 12 peer-reviewed journal articles on talent transfer using the PRISMA approach.

Results and findings: Aiming for a comprehensive, multidisciplinary perspective, the results: introduce a clear, synthesised conceptualisation of talent transfer as an accelerated sport pathway in which a highly trained athlete in one sport (donor sport), transitions to a new sport (recipient sport) with the potential of achieving high-performance success; systematically map influencing factors; and outline considered theories. Factors influencing talent transfer span individual, task-related, and environmental constraints. The review exposes a scarcity of theoretical foundation in current research, suggesting ecological dynamics as a promising approach to advance research and practice.

Implications: Practical and theoretical implications arise, emphasising the usefulness of a synthesised definition and a multifactorial approach for designing, implementing, evaluating, and researching talent transfer pathways. This benefits sports administrators, managers, and researchers.

Sporting organisations are increasingly marketing their LGBTQI+ initiatives. However, limited research provides insights and guidance on how to effectively communicate these initiatives to improve attitudes towards a team and support for the cause. To address this gap, the current research uses Construal Level Theory and cognitive appraisal theory as guiding frameworks to explore how different message frames and target audiences can improve perceptions of sporting organisations being value-driven in their inclusivity initiatives and enhance positive emotional responses of individuals. Two experimental studies were conducted (Study 1 – Australian sport followers n = 403, Study 2 – U.S. sport followers n = 455), with results showing that concrete (as opposed to abstract) message frames targeted towards fans (as opposed to individuals or the community) can enhance support for both inclusivity and attitude towards the team. This is explained by appraisals of value-driven motives and affection as a positive emotional response. The findings have important implications for sport management literature and practice relating to inclusivity marketing, LGBTQI+ initiatives, message framing, construal level theory, and cognitive appraisal theory.

The digital economy with flexible work contexts requires graduates to enter the workplace with digital skills. While studies have examined digital literacy and skills within domains, attending to knowledge, workplace, business and digital skills, these narrow definitions overlook the importance of digital career competencies for lifelong career management. This paper reports on measures of digital career competencies (DCC) and how the dimensionality of these measures might enable universities, students, and other stakeholders to ascertain how these competencies develop. Using a pragmatic, co-created, three-study design, initial dimensions and a pool of measurement items were developed qualitatively, involving responses from 22 alumni. These items and their dimension reliability were then tested with n = 202 students, and further evaluated using a second sample of n = 156 students. The results demonstrate that DCC can be assessed using three dimensions: digital connectedness, career management, and crowdworking. The developed 8-item, three-dimension scale exhibited sound reliability and validity. The novel co-design method for measure development, and the research findings, provide theoretical and practical contributions to emerging empirical research on DCC. These measures provide a parsimonious base for assessing DCC and facilitating the development of these competencies in higher education.

Brisbane will stage a more regionally focused Olympics and Paralympics in 2032 when it follows in the footsteps of a series of mega-city hosts. In this new environment, in which there are challenges finding nations willing even to bid for the event, it is important to understand how sentiment is expressed towards this Games edition, which is being promoted as delivering a sustainable legacy while experiencing different demands, levels of buzz, and risks than previous hosts. This study examines audience emotions towards Brisbane 2032 across 60,929 messages and posts from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and online media articles between 2021 and 2023. The results highlight positive sentiment overall and outline key themes that the community perceive to be important. However, the findings also indicate early concerns and levels of anxiety towards elements of the Games. The multi-layered analytical approach of this study ensures it progresses beyond general judgements on positive and negative sentiment, providing a more nuanced understanding of emotions towards Brisbane 2032.