The influence of race performance on re-participation behaviour of trail runners in the Transgrancanaria event

ABSTRACT

Research question: This paper aims to determine whether race performance has an impact on re-participation behaviour in trail running events. Own performance is a key driver of satisfaction in sport events, but this variable has received less attention than others in the empirical literature about re-participation intentions, even less so for trail running.

Research methods: This paper employed time-series data to analyse re-participation behaviour of trail runners: our dataset includes all participants in the multi-race Transgrancanaria event (Canary Islands, Spain) between 2008 and 2018. A logistic regression (n = 10,170) aims to establish a link between race performance and the propensity to return to the event.

Results and findings: Results show that improving own ranking within the same race has positive impacts on re-participation behaviour for both locals and visiting participants. Progressing to a longer race over time boosts loyalty for locals, while finishing in the top ten for a given category also motivates further participation, but only for non-locals.

Implications: These findings have implications for the race organiser as they shed light on some key drivers of re-participation that can justify the introduction of measures to incentivise loyalty by taking advantage of the broad choice of events on offer. This can be achieved by offering discounts and other benefits linked to performance or race progression.

KEYWORDS:

• Trail running
• re-participation
• athletic performance
• running event
• active sport tourism

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the Associate Editor and two anonymous referees whose detailed comments on the original manuscript contributed to improve this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term ‘revisit’ has been used with both meanings in the sport literature (re-participate in an event or revisit the host city). Throughout this paper, we will refer to re-participation and revisiting separately for the sake of clarity. Local runners can re-participate but not revisit, while non-local runners can either revisit and re-participate or just revisit.

2 It is not uncommon for the organisers of sport events to inflate their economic benefits to attract sponsors and support from public authorities (e.g. Baumann, Matheson, & Muroi, 2009). However, evaluating the accuracy of the estimated economic impact of the Transgrancanaria is beyond the scope of this work.

3 This was done using the Fuzzy Lookup functionality in Excel.

4 Alternative models with top-20 and top-30 variables were explored, with inferior results.