Foreword How we got here
DONCASTER has been on a journey rejuvenating itself and building on its strengths to grow as a place. The hosting of major sports events became a key part of this process in 2012 when we hosted a leg of the Olympic Torch Relay which showcased what could be achieved through working with communities to celebrate the event. This inspired leaders in Doncaster to further develop and, although initially a slow burn, was followed four years later when Doncaster hosted a stage finish of the 2016 Tour de Yorkshire cycling race. Although these events were hugely successful in engaging our communities, we became more interested in what we term the ‘Wimbledon effect’; why more people didn’t take up physical activity and the decline of interest in sport and participation once a sporting event has left the locality. At that time, we had been awarded the hosting of the 2018 Tour de Yorkshire which passed through several local communities, and wanted to examine how community engagement could be enhanced and sustained. In 2018 we commissioned a team from Leeds Beckett University as a research partner to join our ongoing journey into understanding how to align major sporting events with genuine local needs. To understand how we could support longer-term physical activity goals, we worked with the Leeds Beckett team, alongside local people and communities, to help develop interventions, which would encourage more people to be actively involved when hosting future events. We quickly learned that working together (what we term ‘co-creation’) was helpful. We also found that where barriers existed, they worked in combinations, meaning that each neighbourhood proposed, with good reason, widely different ‘solutions’ for increasing engagement. In May 2019 we took the learning from our work in 2018 and further investigated the drivers and motivations of people attending the Tour de Yorkshire by testing a number of our tactics on the ground. We also had the opportunity to take a longer-term approach (6 months) to research and work with one community in Doncaster in the run up to hosting a stage start of the 2019 UCI Road World Cycling Championships held in September. Embedding researchers within the community, while working alongside our event delivery team, enabled us to further refine our approaches, and better understand the personal, local and environmental barriers to engagement. The awarding of Doncaster as a host town for the Rugby League World Cup in 2021 (postponed until 2022 due to COVID-19) has further enabled us to expand our research from transient events to static, stadia events. In preparation for this work, in February 2020 we undertook initial event and community physical activity engagement research at Doncaster’s Castle Park RFU stadium, during Rugby Union’s England Roses vs Ireland, Six Nations Championship match.
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