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Bike fitting is a rapidly developing profession in the field of sport and well-being. The profession is governed by the International Bike Fitting Institute, which recently announced the creation of a common education syllabus. Although this is a positive step forward, to ensure the integrity of the profession, it is important that the content of the syllabus be evidence based. This, however, may prove challenging as there is currently a paucity of research regarding certain aspects of the bike-fitting role. One area that appears to have been largely neglected is the relationship and importance of communication between the bike fitter and client. This scholarly commentary presents research from other professions that demonstrates both the importance of this omission and the necessity to include training on communication and interpersonal skills in the International Bike Fitting Institute’s proposed education provision.

The current study sought to explore the prevalence of uncivil discourse surrounding the Washington NFL team’s removal of offensive Native American imagery and later rebranding as the Washington Commanders. The study employed a quantitative content analysis to assess comment sections of news stories on a sports blog between 2014 and 2022. In addition to uncivil discourse, contextual elements such as popularity, reciprocity, and directionality of incivility were also examined. Dovetailing with existing research, roughly one quarter of all comments featured an element of uncivil discourse, with derogatory slurs toward Native Americans being particularly common. Additionally, contextual elements served important roles in the facilitation of incivility. Taken together, the results point to some of the antisocial behavior that can occur in seemingly innocuous online spaces that often reflect broader social and political turmoil related to Native American imagery in sport.

International sport has always been associated with nationalism. The purpose of the study was to explore how Chinese media and the general public perceived the doping scandal of their national sports hero, Sun Yang. Through analyzing 11 Chinese media outlets’ coverage on Chinese social media Weibo, the results revealed that Chinese media covered Sun and his team’s reaction and perspectives on this issue more when compared with other news. The general public’s perceptions toward this scandal tended to be favorable toward Sun, with 55.5% of selected Weibo comments defending Sun after his 8-year ban for doping was handed down. The analysis of these social media comments posted by sports fans showed that the general public’s perceptions might have been impacted by their nationalism, international relations, and media coverage. In addition, the study revealed the Chinese public’s perceptions toward current antidoping regulations.

Branding and self-presentation strategies on text and visual platforms have been explored in a variety of ways such as gendered analyses and content analyses performed on the social media profiles of athletes at multiple levels of sport. The purpose of this study was to examine branding and self-presentation strategies of two highly visible professional female soccer players (i.e., Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe) over two different time periods: 2019 and 2020. Results show that branding and presentation strategies can shift over the course of an athlete’s career. Implications from this study include adjusting brand strategies for clients over time, using other athletes’ strategies as their own framework, and promoting brand authenticity in accordance with their daily lives.

Sport organizations are developing family-friendly spectator initiatives to boost engagement and sales to parents and children. While the number of women sport fans continues to grow, research has yet to explore how women, as mothers and fans, experience fandom. Informed by a maternal geography framework, this study explores women’s understanding of what does or does not make game-day experiences family-friendly by presenting the accounts of 15 women from North America and Australia who are sport fans and mothers. Interpretive phenomenological analysis is utilized to investigate how mothering as a spatially informed care practice shapes the perspectives of what constitutes a family-friendly sport spectating experience. Findings identify key components of the physical, structural, and social environments of women’s experiences of family-friendly sport fandom, as well as exposing that what is presumed to be family-friendly is not the same as mother-friendly.

Numerous studies have investigated the influence of sponsors on the sport organizations with whom they partner. However, rather than simply assessing the impact of a new, incremental sponsor, which should result in a net positive for the sponsored organization, we quantify and isolate the effect of resources provided upon the switch of one sponsor to another. Furthermore, the resource-based view of the firm is utilized as a theoretical lens to understand the effects of these resources on demand, the ability to recruit human capital, and organizational performance. In Study 1, we analyze 15 years of data from 98 sponsorship agreements, finding that switches provide additional resources, but do not positively impact demand, recruiting, or performance, even in subsequent years. In Study 2, we find that the financial commitment necessary to acquire a sponsorship from a competitor does not result in a corresponding increase in shareholder value for the sponsoring firm.

This study develops and tests a measure for perceived vulnerability to occupational fraud and examines the relationship between organizational capacity and perceived vulnerability to fraud in community sport organizations. Drawing on the opportunity dimension of fraud triangle theory and the concept of organizational capacity, the study identifies a number of risk and protection factors for vulnerability to fraud. Board members of community sport organizations in Australia, Germany, and North America were surveyed (n = 1,256). The results offer a reliable and valid scale assessing vulnerability to fraud in community sport organizations consisting of procedural and financial dimensions. The regression analyses indicate a set of risk factors for vulnerability to fraud, including the presence of paid staff, high annual and unbalanced budgets, and owning sport facilities. Protection factors include strategic planning, relationships with other institutions, and trust within the board. This knowledge can be used to design antifraud education and training resources.