players who may arguably be referred to as
tourists during their visits to foreign countries.
In contrast, when de®ned from a tourism
perspective, a high proportion of spectators
attending one of these matches may be
classi®ed as tourists. The opposite situation is
likely to occur at the recreational levels of
football competitions in that the number of
tourists is much greater in terms of the
participating athletes relative to spectators.
By recognizing competition as a continuum,
the differences between types of involvement
(e.g. spectator versus athlete) can be explored
for elite versus recreational versions of the
sport. These are just two unique characteristics
of sports tourists that can be addressed under
the human element of attraction systems. They
illustrate the types of research questions that
can be articulated by using attraction frame-
works to examine sport tourism.
The second major element of Leiper's (1990)
tourist attraction system is the nucleus or any
feature of a place that a traveller wishes to
experience. This is the site where the tourist
experience is ultimately produced and con-
sumed. It is the site where the tourism resource
is commodi®ed. Individual sports and more
particularly, individual sporting events, be-
come unique attractions based on their de®n-
ing characteristics.
Unique rules and institutional sporting
structures have evolved over time, often
re¯ecting and sometimes in¯uencing the
country's culture. Sport therefore can act as
a powerful symbol of a destination's culture
(e.g., ice hockey in Canada, Nordic skiing in
Norway). In contrast, trends such as the
globalisation of sport may erode the distinc-
tion between places in terms of the culture of
sport. Each sport is characterised by its own
types of physical competition and playful
nature. One of the most signi®cant implica-
tions of these characteristics is that sport
competition outcomes are uncertain. This
inherent uncertainty means that sporting
attractions tend to be authentic and renew-
able. Although value-added entertainment
such as pre-game concerts have been coupled
with sporting events at the elite levels of
competition, the core product remains the
excitement of the sport itself. The question of
what the optimum balance is between the
game and the added entertainments is likely
to become increasingly important in the
future.
Leiper (1990) also raised the idea of a nuclear
mix and hierarchy of attractions. A nuclear mix
refers to the combination of nuclei that a
tourist wishes to experience, and the hierarchy
suggests that some of these nuclei are more
important in in¯uencing visitor decisions than
others. This aspect of the attraction is very
similar to the categories of sport tourism
typologies associated with multiple sport trips
and levels of motivations (Standeven and De
Knop, 1999; Gammon and Robinson, 1996). For
many sport tourists a speci®c sporting event
may function as the primary attraction in a
destination, but the cluster of other nuclei
found in the surrounding area may be needed
to ®nalise the decision to travel. Alternatively,
sports can also serve as an important albeit
secondary nuclei. Appreciating the place of
sport within a destination's attraction mix and
hierarchy is likely to have signi®cant manage-
ment implications.
Markers are items of information about any
phenomenon that is a potential nuclear ele-
ment in a tourist attraction (Leiper, 1990). They
may be divided into markers that are detached
from the nucleus or those that are contiguous.
In each case the markers may either con-
sciously or unconsciously function as part of
the attraction system. Examples of conscious
generating markers featuring sport are com-
mon. Typically, they take the form of adver-
tisements showing visitors involved in
destination-speci®c sport activities and events.
Perhaps even more pervasive are the uncon-
scious detached markers. At the forefront of
these are televised broadcasts of elite sport
competitions and advertisements featuring
sports products in recognisable destinations.
Although sport broadcasts may result in some
spectators choosing to watch the game from
the comfort of their home rather than in
person, in a broader sense, television viewers
have the location marked for them as a tourist
attraction, which may in¯uence future travel
decisions. Chalip et al.'s (1998) paper on
sources of interest in travel to the Olympic
Games lends itself well to this framework,
although markers were not speci®cally men-
tioned in the paper. However, reference to the