Competitive Intensity and National Participation in Elite Sports: Understanding Competitive Dynamics in International Athletics

Abstract This study contributes to our understanding of competitive dynamics in international sports by investigating national participation in athletics. Recent scholarship has suggested that national elite sport policies follow strategic rationales when dedicating scarce resources to participation in international sport. Therefore, the study builds on the structure-conduct-performance paradigm of industrial organization and assumes that countries’ participation in international sport responds to competitive opportunities. Contrary to our expectations, countries seem to be attracted to highly concentrated and densely populated disciplines in which success prospects might be rather low. Thus, participation in international sport does not follow strategic considerations about competitive opportunities as suggested by the structure-conduct-performance-paradigm. Rather, national elite sport policies seem to resemble to some extent imitative behavior. Thus, the findings indicate the need to complement the ‘outside-in’ perspective of the structure-conduct-performance paradigm of industrial organization with an ‘inside-out’ perspective in the tradition of the resource based view. What we need is a more thorough investigation of how national elite sport systems and their distinctive capabilities evolve.