How People Perceive International Sporting Events

This paper examines the relations between people and international sporting events from two perspectives: their actual TV viewing and attitudes, based on longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses of the results of surveys conducted by the NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute including the “Nationwide Survey on Individual Audience Ratings” and the “Public Opinion Survey on the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games.” In terms of TV viewing, it is found respondents watched international sporting events on TV more than “domestic sporting events.” This tendency was most evident among women in their 40s and 50s: for example, a 2022 survey shows an international soccer competition earned high audience rating of 18% while they rarely watched domestic competitions such as athletics and golf. This is partly due to a sentiment that “cheering for Japanese athletes who challenges the world and immensely rejoicing at their victories.” For example, when asked “what impressed you most in the Tokyo Olympic Games,” the largest portion (37%) of women in their 50s cited “Japan won the largest number of gold medals in the country’s history,” which outnumbered “young people performing well.” Likewise, many people cited “table tennis” and “judo” that brought Japan gold medals as “impressive games,” and as to “skateboarding,” although only 13% of people were looking forward to watching it before the Olympics, 37% found it “impressive” after watching Japanese athletes’ successful performances. Meanwhile, people’s willingness to watch the sporting events that had brought Japan medals in the 2016 Rio Olympic Games declined only about two years after the Games, and as many as 65% of respondents cited that the excitement of the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics was “nothing but temporary,” which highlighted the aspect that the excitement of sports sparked by international competitions is “easily heated but cooled down just as easily.”