Breaking Ice: An In-depth Examination of China's Winter Sports Participation in the Wake of Beijing 2022

Is there evidence from secondary data to suggest advancement towards Beijing 2022's objective of "Motivating 300 million individuals to engage in winter sports"? This study explored the Beijing 2022 sport participation legacy by adopting a quantitative approach with triangulation. The preliminary findings highlight the multifaceted and complex nature of evaluating the sport participation legacy goal of a Sport Mega Event (SME). The broad definition of the goal to "Motivate 300 million people to engage in winter sports," as well as the characteristics of the political mission's cultural and systemic context, were some of the factors that played an important role when trying to assess this target. Moreover, this paper revealed three crucial mechanisms transmitting the passion of winter sports from SME to mass participation legacy, through quantitatively examining the promised target. There were "Leveraging sports policy", "Provision of facilities accompanying the integration of sport and education", and "Cooperative stakeholders` alliance strengthened by media power and technology". We anticipate that this study will make a valuable contribution towards addressing the challenges posed by the broad and ambitious nature of Beijing 2022's goal, whilst facilitating further investigations on the transformative strategies. Keywords: Winter sports participation; Impact and legacy; Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics; Social sustainability; Triangulation