As a research topic, sport event tourism became firmly
established in the 1990s and has been expanding explosively
since 2000. An early published contribution came
from Rooney’s (1988) classic geographical studies of sport,
specifically in the form of a paper on mega sport events as
tourist attractions at the 1988 TTRA Montreal conference.
The journal of Sport and Tourism was founded in 1993
(after 7 years in electronic format) as the Journal of Sport
Tourism and edited by Joseph Kurtzman as an initiative of
the new Sports Tourism International Council.