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The purpose of this paper is to investigate why and how universities in the Glasgow region sought to leverage the 2014 Commonwealth Games to achieve their own benefits.

An in-depth qualitative case study, utilising documentary evidence and in-depth interviews, was employed to examine how Glasgow universities leveraged the Games, and the outcomes they sought.

Universities sought to leverage the 2014 Commonwealth Games to garner a range of benefits, including increased brand awareness, student and staff development opportunities, new or improved infrastructure, and strengthened stakeholder relationships. Leveraging strategies included developing relationships with other Games’ stakeholders to establish and participate in collaborations, committees, and research consortia, hosting ancillary events, and hosting teams on training camps. However, data revealed substantial barriers to effective leveraging, such as insufficient resourcing and lack of leadership, and consequently several interviewees conveyed a sense of missed opportunities.

The results can inform universities located in host regions about the opportunities and challenges to strategically leveraging an event. Also, if event organisations understand the leveraging ambitions of event stakeholders, such as universities, they can better facilitate and manage their relationships with such stakeholders to maximise event benefits in the host region.

This research considers the leveraging activities of a previously un-researched event stakeholder group (universities) that have the potential to deliver benefits that reach students, staff, and industry interest groups in event host communities. The knowledge contributed could aid universities in future event host regions to strategically leverage to maximise the benefits of major sport events.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how non-host cities strategically plan to leverage pre-Games training for the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games to maximize benefits to the city.

Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with key tourism and government stakeholders involved in developing leveraging strategies for pre-Games training in a non-host city. Interviews were conducted a little over 18 months before the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.

A model of the strategic planning of leveraging pre-Games training is presented. Pre-Games training was positioned as a leverageable resource. The non-host city was well positioned to host pre-Games training given its existing sport focus and facilities and its proximity to the host city and its similar climate. Opportunities, objectives, means, and considerations were constantly developed. The city strategically targeted teams to maximize the use of the training facilities and make the most of the value of well-known athletes, while being cautious of overcrowding. The teams had to be secured before strategies were devised to achieve other opportunities and objectives. Short-term benefits included generating tourism through visiting teams and entourages and integrating visiting teams into the local community through education and sport programming. Long-term benefits included building the destination’s capacity and reputation as a place for elite training camps and tourism.

Understanding how to develop strategies to leverage pre-Games training can inform those responsible for developing and implementing pre-Games training strategies and lead to maximizing the benefits to a city or region.

Limited research has examined the strategic planning process used to develop tactics to leverage mega-events. This study provides insight into the strategic planning process of non-host cities to increase short- and long-term benefits by leveraging pre-Games training.

This research explores ambush marketing on social media during the 2018 Commonwealth Games held in Australia. Two social media platforms – Twitter and Instagram – served as the dataset to uncover how official sponsors of the Canadian and Australian Commonwealth Games teams were ambushed.

Employing a content analysis of all official team sponsors and their competitors, the study’s findings offer an original and multi-national look into social media ambushing.

Results indicated that promoting Games’ links was the most common social media post type used by official event sponsors, followed by sharing results of their endorsed athletes and behind-the-scenes information.

In an effort to provide connection to the event, posts by ambushers focused on promoting athletes endorsed by their brand. All ambushers were more likely to use Twitter to promote their endorsed athletes. Instagram, however, was not fully embraced in their ambush marketing.

Discussion and implications of the results provide sport marketers with information on how to leverage one’s link with a major sporting event.

In a major multi-sport event, the athlete is both a benefactor and producer of organizational activities. Athletes’ centrality makes understanding their satisfaction with the event an important management activity. The purpose of this paper is to examine the lived athletes experience (during the event), so as to provide insight into the important Games facets contributing to their satisfaction and to explore the controllable aspects of the event from an organizer’s perspective that athletes felt made the Games special and memorable.

A multi-dimensional instrument (i.e. Athlete Experience Questionnaire) was designed and tested at previous iterations of a major multi-sport event and was employed during Games-time. In total, 813 athletes completed the questionnaire during the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games.

The findings demonstrated an overall high level of satisfaction with the event. Several important facets contributed to athlete satisfaction including social-, service- and communication-related aspects. Further, athletes reported on the importance of cultural opportunities within their Games experience.

The paper denotes the importance of the social and cultural interactions and opportunities which lie outside the athletes’ actual competition experience and increase their specialness of the event. Theoretical and practical implications are drawn from the findings relative to the service-dominant logic and service-quality literature within a major multi-sport event Games for the athlete stakeholder.

This paper explores how athletes experience the major international multi-sport event environment. Moreover, this paper offers a significant contribution from a hard-to-reach population (i.e. elite-level international athletes), adopts their perspective of the Games environment and determines what contributes to their satisfaction. As the authors highlight, the paper denotes the importance of the planned social and cultural interactions and opportunities, which lie outside the athlete’s actual competition event experience, to increase athlete satisfaction; in contrast, basic sport competition needs seem to be a “basic” expectation.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a case study of a global challenge: the relationship between commercial development and the protection of eco-fragile systems particularly where river water is involved. It reviews and critiques the legal and political processes that underpinned the Commonwealth Games (CWG) 2010 in Delhi and the building of the accommodation Village on the floodplain of the river Yamuna.

The paper covers the controversial modern history of the Yamuna river that runs through Delhi. The river is “dead” and has been subject to litigation concerning its usage and that of its flood plain. In particular, the controversy peaked prior to the CWG 2010 in Delhi and the required buildings associated with the games. The paper traces the history of the legal actions and the inter-related involvement of the various actors being the politicians, construction developers, the river bank dwellers and the local environmentalists. Close analysis is made of the statutory administrative procedures required for environmental clearance, the subsequent case law both in the High Court of Delhi and the Supreme Court of India. Additionally, usage is made of the media and its concerns over corrupt and negligent practices.

The Indian judiciary in their willingness to promote the construction of the Village failed to apply its own environmental jurisprudence. There was a failure to “lift the veil” and review flawed administrative practices that violated governing statutes. National pride, time pressures, political support, economic interests and rapid urbanisation created a pressure that the courts could not challenge. It was left to investigative committees, after the Games had concluded, to expose these wrongdoings.

The paper highlights the issue of the relationship of the courts and political and economic interests and how legally protected ecological interests are ignored.

The Commonwealth Games were the inspiration of a Mr J. Ashley Cooper, who in a letter to The Times of October 1892 proposed a periodic sports gathering as a means of ‘increasing the goodwill and good understanding between nations of an Empire’. His dream became part reality in 1911, when an ‘Inter‐Empire Sports Meeting’ was staged in London to celebrate the coronation of George V. In 1928 Mr Bobby Robinson made a proposal at the Amsterdam Olympic Games to the representative nations from the Empire. He asked if they would participate in an all‐British Empire Games to be held in Hamilton, Ontario in 1930. Happily this saw the birth of the Commonwealth Games.

The 12^th South Asian Games were held in India in Guawhati and Shillong in February 2016, after repeated rescheduling. There were a number of challenges to organizing the games such as lack of infrastructure, legacy of corruption from past games, shortage of time etc. However, the games were held within 90 days of the announcement of venues and final dates. Sri Yadav, the Secretary, Department of Sports wants to understand the key drivers of success behind organizing the event. He also wants to understand how the success of Indian athletes at SAG could be leveraged for success at larger events.

Sport mega-events have received much criticism of late. However, there has been increasing awareness of the brand-related benefits from hosting a sport mega-event, with their hosting being a deliberate policy for many nations, most notably among emerging nations. One such nation is South Africa, which explicitly stated its nation branding ambitions through the staging of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Through this single case, this paper aims to identify the unique characteristics of the sport mega-event that were leveraged for benefits of nation branding.

An interpretivist, qualitative study explored the insights of nation brand stakeholders and experts, elicited using in-depth, semi-structured interviews (n = 27) undertaken two to three years after the staging of the event.

Three characteristics of the 2010 sport mega-event were deemed by stakeholders to be unique in creating nation branding opportunities: the scale of the event that created opportunities for transformational development; the global appeal, connection and attachment of the event; and the symbolic status of the event that was leveraged for internal brand building and public diplomacy. The paper proposes that while sport mega-events provide nation branding opportunities, the extent of these benefits may vary according to the context of the nation brand with lesser-known, troubled or emerging brands seemingly having the most to gain.

While acknowledging the critique of mega-events, this paper highlights a pertinent example of an emerging nation that leveraged the potential of a sport mega-event for nation branding gains. It extends the understanding of sport mega-events and their potential for nation branding.

The Olympic Gold Quest (OGQ) was founded as a Non-profit to support Indian athletes in their quest to win Olympic Gold medals by bridging the gap between the best athletes in India and in the world. The support from OGQ has been instrumental to India in winning its highest number of medals at any summer Olympics. Buoyed by this success, OGQ has set up a target of achieving eight Olympic medals at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. With OGQ relying on donations to support the athletes, the challenge is to market the Olympic cause by creating, communicating, and delivering the right offering for its donors.