Charlotte Van Tuyckom Bücher

The book explores the varied landscape of sports participation across Europe, revealing that approximately 60% of EU citizens engage in sports, leaving a significant portion inactive. It highlights notable cross-national differences in participation rates and the underlying social inequalities within and between member states. The research underscores that despite the increasing accessibility and popularity of sports, participation remains influenced by social structures, indicating that sports are not universally practiced across Europe.

Since winning medals at Olympic Games has become an objective that all countries want to achieve, a lot of empirical research has been devoted to the factors that result in some countries to perform better than others. Against this background, this Master Dissertation gives a quantitative lisrel-analysis of the following topics: 1. To what extent are welfare characteristics predictors of Olympic medal success? 2. If so, what measure of welfare is most relevant in this respect? 3. How do the above mechanisms change over time? In particular, how can the Los Angeles Summer Games (1984) be compared with the Athens Summer Games (2004) in this respect?