III.1. The meaning of sport tourism
Sport and tourism have a lot of common characteristics. Their emergence is related to the spending of one’s free time and both of them can be described as cultural phenomena. They can be done individually or in teams, and both of them have a significant impact on economy. They are closely related to the quality of life, level of income. Social, health intelelctual and emotional state of the individual members of a given society. N Both of them can be characterized by spacial and temporary dimensions.
Sport is an important activity within the group of tourism activities, while tourism is an important feature of sport. (Hinch and Higham 2001). Sporttoursm is a type of tourism, in which the primary goal and motivation for travel is some kind of sport. It means travelling from one’s place of residence to destinations, where one can be actively engaged in some kind of competitive or recreational sport, or can experience its atmosphere or social impact. Hall (1992) relates three inseparable areas to the notion of sport tourism: (1) hallmark events; (2) outdoor recreation (3) health and fitness-related activities.
Another aim in sport tourism can be visiting special sport-related sights and attractions, seeing sport relics, such as sport museums, stadiums, halls of fame.In a broader sense those activities can be included here, in which, spontaneously or purposefully, tourists make use of sport-related events ansd sights a destination can offer to them, even when it was not their primary goal.
Sporttourists are those individual persons or groups of people, who, actively or passively participate in some kind of competitive or recreational sport when staying away from their place of residence or work. Sport, physical exercise, tourism mean experiencing time and space. In sport tourism there are three elements of key importance:
- Its rules, competition, playfulness
- Its spatial characteristics include geographical components, environment, landscape, regional and local characteristics.
- Its temporary components include the length of sport activity, seasonality and its ztemporary development. (Hinch és Higham 2001).
Bővebben: http://divcom.otago.ac.nz/tourism/research/electronicpubs/super12/
Tourism activity, which is based on physical activity, Hungarian terminology before adopting the term sport tourism, used to call active tourism. „Active tourism is a form of tourism, in which the tourists’ motivation is some recreational or leisure time physical activity.” (Magyar Turizmus Rt. 2007). These two definitions mostly overlap. (Csapó et al. 2011). It is thought that active sport tourism is their cross section. The remaining parts, those activities which do not qualify as sport activities (e.g. walking, picking something, sunbathing, camping, boating, pleasure bathing etc.) belong to the category of passive sport tourism..
The definition of sport tourism is very complicated, because it is a multidisciplinary notion and it is inseparable from the notions of recreational and non-recreationl tourism. It can be stated that sport tourism is not only part of tourism, buti t is related to the notion of recreation as well. (Gáldi 2011).