SPORTS ATTRACTIONS
Sports Museums & Visitor Attractions
Terry Stevens of Stevens & Associates reveals how the growing trend for sports museums and halls of fame is attracting fans and tourists interested in sporting culture, while generating additional revenue
t’s unlikely any article in the history of Attractions Management Handbook has opened with a quote from TS Eliot; well here’s a break with tradition. In 1947, Eliot wrote in Towards the Definition of Culture that “even the humblest material artefact, which is the product and symbol of a particular civilisation, is an emis- sary of the culture out of which it comes”. In this way, sports museums, halls of fame, visitor centres and the new generation of fan zones – Cardiff City Stadium in the UK or Turner Field in Atlanta, US, where interactive experiences are built around stadia – provide fans and tourists with insights into a nation’s, region’s, community’s or club’s sporting culture and the context in which it developed.
I SPORTING HERITAGE
These sporting attractions have a strong heritage in their own right, with the oldest
sports museums in Helsinki and Prague hav- ing existed for more than 50 years. The past 30 years have seen national sports museums being built in Stockholm, Paris, Basel, and Melbourne. Most recently Singapore and the US have also opened national museums dedicated to sport. In Lausanne, an Olympic museum has ex-
isted in the Olympic Capital since the 1980s. A new US$40m (£26.4m, €30.9m) museum was opened on Quai D’Ouchy in 1993, and in January 2012 this highly acclaimed 20-year-old Olympic Museum closed for a major refurbishment to incorporate the recent Olympiads. It’s due to re-open this year. The Olympic movement has spawned numerous museums. Sochi opened Sporting Glory in 2008, while it’s anticipated that the London Olympic legacy will result in a new attraction within the Olympic Park. Other host cities will inevitably aim to join in this trend.
Ajax is now on its third museum. Built at a cost of €4.5m, the new experiential, immersive museum brings the heart and soul of the football club into the heart of the city of Amsterdam
50 Attractions Handbook 2013–2014
SPORTS TOURISM In the 2012 edition of the Sports Man- agement Handbook, sports tourism was highlighted as one of the fastest growing sectors of global international tourism (The Sleeping Giant: page 34). According to the UN World Tourism Or- ganisation, sports tourism is currently worth around US$600bn (£394bn, €463bn) per annum. It accounts for 10 per cent of the one billion global international tourist arrivals and is predicted to grow at 14 per cent per annum over the period 2012–20. This growth is fuelled by mega-sporting events and people travelling to watch or par- ticipate in sports. There’s also an increasing demand both for sport as part of wellbe- ing- and fitness-motivated travel and sport as heritage or nostalgia travel. The relatively new phenomenon of sports architecture tour- ism involves visiting great stadia or arenas, irrespective of whether or not an event is taking place. London’s Olympic Park and the tours of the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff are examples of this increasingly popular activity. Clearly, sports museums and visitor attractions are fundamentally important com-
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