Do the Olympics really motivate people to try sport?

I don't think it is all doom and gloom. Despite the lack of sports facilities, the cost and the aspiration of so many to sit on the couch wishing for the lifestyles of reality TV personalities. Every community seems to also have some commited individuals who run local football, running, cycling, martial arts, badminton etc clubs and who give hundreds of hours of their free time to make it happen. The most important part of getting involved in sport i.e other people to do it with who will welcome and support you regardless of ability or potential, is alive and healthy in the British mentality of self organisation.

Wether the Olympics specifically inspires more than a few to pursue elite sport is somewhat irrelevent. I think it has a wider message about humanity being able to organise an international event that doesn't involve lobbing munitions at each other. I look forward to the Olympics and Paralympics in the same way that people who like football look forward to the World Cup or people who like film stars look forward to the Oscars.

I agree with Davel when he writes facilities, facilities, facilities.

Where I live the local high school was built using PFI. Anyone who wants to use the facilities outside school hours has to pay the company who owns the school.

Re people taking up sports: IMO kids have to be taught and encouraged to try different sports at an early age in schools. During my school years we had a choice of football or football. The government needs to plough money into school facilities here.  The government claims inactivity costs the country £20 billion a year. Put up the facilities and encourage our kids to excel at a sport when they're young and they'll take it into adulthood saving the NHS a fortune.

We need to be more like the USA where kids can get scholarships for excelling at just about every sport imagineable, athletics , golf,  football, baseball, boxing, swimming etc, etc. You name it, they teach it and give scholarships for it. IMO the main thing that holds our kids back is not having the opportunity through lack of facilities.

I wonder whether part of the reason for the figures is getting active vs doing sport. I have little desire to compete in any form of cycling beyond the occasional Strava segment (lol) and yet I think the Olympics did play some role in helping inslire me to get active and enjoy cycling, having become a bit of a couch potato for a few years.

I just don't think this survey covers a lot of the benefits.

I wonder what the age range of the 2,000 respondents was and what social groups they belonged to. And of the 7% that were inspired it would be interesting to find out (1) what activity they took up and (2) how long it lasted.

Are people really inspired by sport on TV? How many blokes put the beer down and go out and play footie as a result of watching the Euros? The football fans I know are all overweight couch potatoes.

Does Mastermind inspire anyone to spend months memorising every detail of an author's life and work? Do people build/renovate a house after watching Escape to the Country or DIY SOS? Television is entertainment, something to keep you on the couch and save you having to think for or go out and do stuff yourself.

"17% cited the cost of playing sport as being the main thing stopping them". Which sport(s)? A pair of trainers or a football is not a big outlay.

My wife always argues that one of the biggest influences on participation as an adult is a your experience of sport/PE at school. She was marginalised and bullied for being crap at the usual sports. If you were not good at running, jumping or kicking a ball then you were considered a no-hoper and PE teachers, invariably 'sporty' people, often fail to grasp that it should primarily be fun.

If UK Sport want to encourage greater participation they should look at communities, grassroots clubs, facilities and the increasing pressure on public spaces - most importantly, the suffocating effect of motorised traffic on mobility, whether in towns and cities or rural areas.

No because I know it doesn't matter how hard I try I will never have the opportunity to be that good.

The UK loves corporate entertainment where lots of people pay to go to an event, get hammered and never actually see the action but claim they were there.

As mentioned in another post, people like being there. Actually getting sweaty or mucky is frowned upon.

Then you have to put down culture. Tell people I'm riding 100 miles including 27 sectors of pave. I'm told I'm mad. Tell people I'm not prepared to ride in freezing rain and 30 mile winds, I'm a wuss.

people arent blaming anyone for their own lack of fitness, the point of the survey is to judge the impact of the olympics, and olympic success paid for by UK Sport, on attitude towards taking up sport, the whole inspire the next generation thing. Even if the sample size is probably too low to draw much from it, its probably not unreasonable to conclude that simply watching success at an olympics, doesnt encourage people to take up a sport as a result, and thats the issue.

and thats probably because theres very little done in conversion post Olympics to take those successes out to people who arent involved in sport at all. It was something I noticed both at the 2012 Olympics and TdF in Yorkshire, people were very involved in wanting to be part of the events, because the event was the key thing to them, very few then converted to picking up those sports as a result of it.

Facilities, facilities, facilities.

Only 12% might have blamed the lack of facilities directly, but if a large number of people had decent, cheap/free facilities within reach, seems to me that'd tackle another couple of major complaints.

A friend of mine lives in a nondescript mid California town, round the corner from a run-of-the-mill state middle school, which is next to an equally run-of-the-mill high school. The middle school has a 400m shale running track, 6 basketball courts, 6 tennis courts, and a 200m grass track. The high-school next-door has another 6 basketball courts, a full-size American football pitch/stadium with 2 stands, an 8-lane tartan running track around the pitch, 4 baseball pitches and 2 'soccer' pitches. They're available for use by the locals outside school hours - and they do use them. He tells me this is pretty typical of his experience of the US.

Round the corner from me in NW England: a slightly American-feeling park with a basketball court, skate park and running track. Always busy. I'm a big believer in 'if you build it, they will come'. Not the entrenched fatties, and England and California have plenty of them, but if we don't build it, sell off our school playing fields and make PE optional, it doesn't matter how many Olympic Games we host: a large chunk of the population treating sport as alien is the completely predictable outcome.

People who like to watch sport on TV don't participate in sport shocker...

If "they" want to encourage cycling, it would be far better to spend some money on decent infrastructure.  Even then, I have a sneaking suspicion that most people who don't exercise simply can't be arsed.

"18% blamed their busy lifestyle for their failure to get active" - in other words, they'd rather watch the telly.

"17% cited the cost of playing sport as being the main thing stopping them" - when going for a walk, or doing a few burpees/press-ups/sit-ups/planks at home is free.

"12% claimed a lack of local facilities" - do they not have a room in their home that is big enough to lay down in?

"9% said the money would be better spent on schemes targeting those who do not exercise enough" - I would love to know what these schemes would actually involve.

As usual, some people blaming everyone but themselves for their own lack of fitness.

Team GB have inspired me to support Australia in the Track Cycling.

BREAKING NEWS.... Water is wet!