Understanding spectators' perspectives towards a sports competition is one of the major marketing issues in professional sport management. The purposes of this study are (1) to develop a scale to measure spectators' involvement in athletic elements of figure skating which can be deemed as the core product, (2) to examine the relationships of such involvement with antecedent variables and consequent variables, and (3) to examine involvement in athletic elements by the difference in gender of a player supporting. We analyzed a sample of 478 spectators at the 2013 NHK Trophy Grand Prix of Figure Skating. The results of confirmatory factor analyses revealed that athletic elements consisted of technical and aesthetic dimensions. Furthermore, the findings indicated that spectators' involvement had significant relationships with their knowledge regarding figure skating as well as consequent variables such as their intention to support a specific athlete and spectating behavior. This observation could significantly contribute to the development of marketing strategies for figure skating events.

The National Sports Festival (NSF), an annual intra-prefectural sporting competition in Japan, is recently intended to be the most competitive domestic sport event and a platform for athlete identification and development. In most prefectures, overall ranking at the NSF is placed on their sport policy agenda. In this study, the determinants of prefectural success at the NSF are empirically analysed and the theoretical values were calculated with the econometric model, using panel data of the forty-seven prefectures. By means of a panel data analysis, the authors find that macro-level factor (population and the number of head offices) and meso-level factors (being the host; being the future host in three, two years, and next year; being the former host one to six years before; and having speciality sports) are positively related to the total points. Overall, our results confirmed that policy effort for the success in the NSF can surpass the advantage in economic and human resources.