How to create sustainable winter sports participation legacy? a case study of Beijing 2022 winter sports participation legacy with critical realism ontology

The Olympic culture "Sport for All" (IOC, 2021b) propagates the shared vision of previous, present, and future hosts to increase sports participation. Evidence has been found in both academia and practice that hosting sports mega events (SME) has the potential to increase sports participation (A. Pappous, 2011; Weed et al., 2015) and facilitate sustainable development (Hindson et al., 1994; Hogan & Norton, 2000). Thus, it is important to learn from the past of the Olympic movement regardless of the geographical and cultural distances among host nations. Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympics impressed the world by achieving the ambitious "300 million" goal (IOC, 2022). However, international scholars have questioned the origins and feasibility of this goal. Besides curiosity about the number, many researchers have turned their eyes to the strategies, programs, and legacy delivery mechanisms behind them. Our dissertation satisfied these curiosities by creating a theoretical approach and examining the political promise and the legacy delivery process. Firstly, we developed an integrated framework by combining CR with the "Three-Source Model" (Liu & Jiang, 2016). With the conceptual model, triangulation, and the Qualitative Quantitative Mixed Method, we examined whether Beijing 2022 has achieved the goal of "Motivating 300 million individuals to engage in winter sports" through Study 1 and how it happened via Study 2. In the discussion, we focused on what could different stakeholders of the preceding and future Olympic Games learn from Beijing 2022 in terms of social sustainability and revealed that the bilateral paths would facilitate both the pre-game legacy and the post-game legacy. For future research, we suggest launching future studies addressing social reality, the efficiency, and effectiveness of the legacy delivery, and supporting regional development and knowledge sharing/ transfer with the advanced sport governing concept of “Big Society”.