Why Summer and Winter Olympic Fans Form Different Attachments

Every four years, the Olympics briefly gives the impression that millions of people are watching the same event for the same reason. Flags appear in windows, unfamiliar sports become essential viewing and athletes who were largely unknown a week earlier suddenly become national figures. From the outside, it can look like one enormous, unified audience gathered around the Olympic rings.

The reality is much more complicated.

A new study of more than 1,000 Olympic fans in the United States suggests that attachment to the Games is built from several overlapping relationships. Some people are drawn to the Olympics themselves, others to Team USA, a particular athlete or the sport being contested. More importantly, the balance between those attachments changes depending on whether people are following the Summer or Winter Games.

That distinction matters because sports organisations, broadcasters and sponsors have often treated fandom as though it were a single, easily understood quality. Someone watches, buys a ticket, follows an athlete or engages with a sponsor, and the behaviour is recorded as evidence of interest. Yet two people performing the same action may be attached to entirely different parts of the experience.

One may be following the nation. Another may care about the athlete. A third may be devoted to the sport and only mildly interested in the Olympics around it. They are all fans, but not necessarily of the same thing.

Olympic fandom is built in layers

The researchers examined four connected forms of attachment: attachment to the Olympics, Team USA, individual sports and particular athletes. Their findings suggest that the national team plays an especially important role in turning general sporting motivation into a stronger connection with the Olympic Games.

In other words, Team USA appears to act as a bridge. A person may begin with a general interest in competition, national pride or the spectacle of elite performance, but the national team gives that motivation a recognisable identity. The Olympics becomes more than a collection of events because it becomes a story about “us”.

This helps explain one of the peculiar strengths of Olympic fandom. Most sports audiences spend years building familiarity with leagues, clubs and recurring personalities. The Olympics has to create emotional relevance within a much shorter period. National identity provides a shortcut, turning sports that many viewers rarely follow into events that suddenly feel personally significant.

The study found that motivation significantly predicted attachment to both the Olympics and Team USA, while it did not directly produce the same attachment to individual athletes or sports. Team USA attachment, in turn, strengthened overall attachment to the Games.

That finding should interest sponsors and rights holders because it suggests that simply placing an athlete or sport at the centre of a campaign may not be enough. The wider emotional context matters. Fans may respond more strongly when the athlete’s story is connected to national representation, shared experience and the meaning of the Olympic event itself.

Summer and Winter fans are not the same audience

The most revealing part of the research is the difference between Summer and Winter Olympic fans.

For Summer fans, the direct relationship between motivation, Team USA and the Olympics was stronger. These viewers appear more likely to connect readily with the wider Olympic spectacle and its national story. That makes some intuitive sense. The Summer Games includes many globally familiar sports and arrives with an enormous cultural footprint. Athletics, swimming, gymnastics and basketball already have recognisable stars, established narratives and broad public awareness.

The Summer Olympics can therefore draw people into the event at scale before they have formed a deep attachment to any one sport or athlete.

Winter fandom appears to work differently. The researchers found that Winter fans relied more heavily on a combination of sport, athlete and Team USA attachments to build their broader Olympic connection. Rather than entering through the Games alone, they were more likely to reach the Olympics through the components within it.

This makes Winter Olympic fandom potentially narrower, but also richer. A fan of skiing, ice hockey or figure skating may bring an existing relationship into the Games. They may already understand the sport’s rituals, personalities and rivalries. Their Olympic attachment is assembled from those smaller, more specialised loyalties.

It means that marketing the Winter Games as though it were simply a colder version of the Summer Olympics risks missing how its audience is actually formed. Summer fandom may often begin with the event and spread downwards. Winter fandom may need to begin with the athlete or sport and build upwards.

The surprising limit of sport attachment

One of the study’s more unexpected findings was that attachment to a particular sport did not necessarily strengthen attachment to the Olympics. Across the overall sample, stronger sport attachment actually weakened the relationship with the wider event, while athlete attachment was not significant overall.

At first, this seems counterintuitive. Surely a passionate swimming or skiing fan should be more attached to the Games that showcase those sports at their highest level?

Not always.

A highly committed sports fan may care more about the sport’s normal calendar, leagues and championships than its temporary place within the Olympic programme. The Olympics can become a stage on which the sport appears rather than the true object of attachment. The fan is watching the swimming, not necessarily the Games.

This is an important reminder that attention does not automatically transfer. A popular athlete may attract viewers without making them Olympic fans. A sport may generate intense interest without deepening loyalty to the event that contains it. The audience can be large while the underlying relationships remain fragmented.

Sponsors often assume that emotional value moves neatly from athlete to team, team to event and event to brand. In reality, those connections have to be earned. The fan may love one part of the system while feeling indifferent towards the rest.

What this means for Olympic sponsors

For marketers, the research suggests that Olympic sponsorship should be built around pathways of attachment rather than reach alone.

A Summer campaign may benefit from leaning into the scale, shared national moment and recognisable identity of Team USA. The attraction is the collective spectacle: millions of people briefly gathering around the same performances and stories.

A Winter campaign may need to work harder at the level of the individual sport. It may require longer-term storytelling, athlete familiarity and stronger links to the specialist communities that already exist around particular disciplines. Instead of expecting the Olympic brand to provide all the emotional weight, sponsors may need to help people travel from a sport or athlete towards the larger event.

This also changes the timing. If Winter fandom depends more heavily on existing attachment to athletes and disciplines, the relationship cannot be built during the Games alone. It needs to begin earlier, through qualifying events, athlete journeys, behind-the-scenes stories and participation within the culture of the sport.

The campaign around the Games may last a few weeks. The fandom that supports it has to be developed over years.

Why Olympic fandom needs to be measured differently

The study points towards a wider problem in sports marketing. Fandom is often measured as a collection of visible actions: viewing figures, ticket sales, social engagement, merchandise purchases and sponsor recall. These measures are useful, but they tend to flatten very different relationships into one category.

Knowing that someone watched an Olympic event does not tell us what drew them there. It may have been national identity, an athlete’s story, an existing love of the sport or the wider spectacle of the Games. Each attachment has a different strength, a different lifespan and a different commercial meaning.

The same viewing figure could represent a lifelong skiing fan, a patriotic viewer watching Team USA or someone briefly captivated by a viral athlete. One may remain engaged after the closing ceremony. Another may disappear until the next Games. A third may follow the athlete but never develop any lasting connection to the Olympics.

This is why fandom cannot be properly understood through audience size alone. Sports organisations and sponsors need to measure where attachment sits, how the different layers reinforce or compete with one another and whether the relationship strengthens over time.

They should be asking whether fans are attached to the athlete, the discipline, the national team, the event or some combination of all four. They should also understand whether those attachments lead to participation, advocacy, repeat viewing or commercial behaviour, rather than assuming that every form of attention has the same value.

The researchers’ comparison of Summer and Winter fans shows that even audiences gathered under the same brand can arrive through very different emotional routes. The practical lesson is that fandom is not a single metric derived from watching more often. It is a changing structure of relationships.

The Olympics may be one event, but there is no single Olympic fan.

The organisations that learn to measure these layers will be better able to understand not only how many people are watching, but what they are attached to, why the attachment exists and where it may lead next.

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Emerald Insight / Yufei Bai; Hongxin Li; Hemin Song; Yunchao Bai