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The term “sport” is polysemous and the diversification of sporting activities makes it even more difficult to gain a proper grasp of the true range of practices it covers. This word, as used without distinction in the common parlance, cannot be reduced down to the practitioners, to the public show event, the equipment, or to the sports market. Like tourism, it is a complete set of fields operating as a system. This complex system brings together these diverse elements, lending itself to the interplay of social institutions. However, whereas in tourism it is the non-everyday journeys which create the links, sport derives its specificity from practices organized from motivational situations by individuals acting in specific places. This article aims first to clarify the use of the concept by showing the radical difference that should be established between the competitive sports and purely recreational sporting activities. These two types of activity can be brought together under the expression “sporting cultures” because in their various different ways they set motivating situations to work. The paper goes on to show that geography, the science of space and societies, provides keys to understanding these sporting cultures by using revised methods of the discipline, particularly those based on observation, cognition and action.

This article presents a conceptual and functional point of view the potential contribution of a geomarketing approach for research on sports services. This involves not just a straightforward collusion between geography and marketing, but primarily a decision-making phase, a key element for allowing expansion of sports activities. Although its methods borrow much from spatial analysis and geomatics, and are in keeping with a structuralist perspective, the interest of geomarketing is in no way restricted to market research, nor to the mapping of clients or prospects within catchment areas. It means going beyond the idea of using only spatial representation of the data for integrating the geographical dimension into the marketing strategy. This integration pushes towards a more systematic perspective using marketing as a model for analysing sports services for which practitioners' or consumers' choices have become predominant. After putting research into the geography of sport back into its scientific context, a definition of geomarketing is proposed, with stress made on the specificity of sports services. Three broad fields of operation are then defined as avenues of study which combine the expectations of the actors with new geographical perspectives.

With the development of new sport-related recreational practices over the past two decades, the social uses of public spaces and utilities have evolved. Skaters, rollers, joggers and all sort of street sports became new figures of the urban landscape that cannot be ignored. This article analyses the relations between the sports practitioners and their activity spaces - but also the relationship between them and others urbanites. This gives food for thought on the role of public spaces in contemporary cities. Beyond the conflicts or the conviviality observed, what do we learn about urban social relations ? Do these sporting activities contribute to in the social fragmentation of the city ? In an attempt to answer those questions, our analysis shows the specificity of new sport-related recreational practices as urban habits and how they produce their own social bounds while renewing the role of public spaces.

Sport has been a tool of international relations since the dawn of the XXth Centuryand still continues to be part of the international scene. A geopolitical approach of sport is therefore useful and is in line with the definition of Lacoste about geopolitics which stresses the role of imagery used in conflicts. In fact, sport is a symbolic confrontation and this image can be used for manipulation by certain actors. First, we describe relations between the various actors of the Olympic movement because the Olympic Games are now the most popular show broadcast in the world and the Olympic movement controls the family of sport at the international scale. We then analyse the way the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is playing its own international relations game. Its power is inherent to its authority to recognize countries as does the United Nations Organization. Taking part in the Olympic ceremony is a proof of international recognition and many new nations need it. This recognition has created a “sports geography” which is different from the traditional geography of States and sometimes interferes with this. Moreover, IOC tries to be an actor of international relations in order to strengthen its own position and to eliminate possible rivals which could run sports at the world scale. The other key actors are States which use or manipulate sport in order to deliver messages to their own population or to the international community. Some create a sports diplomacy which is an element of soft power. More recently, a new actor has begun to use sport. NGOs such as Greenpeace or Amnesty International take advantage of sporting events to deliver their own messages.