Do big sporting events make us do more sport?

I recently spent half a weekend sitting on the sofa watching the Davis Cup. I thought about going for a run, but I did not want to miss the rest of the match. Soon it was starting to get dark, so I did not bother. Whenever I watch tennis, I think how nice it would be to play it regularly. But I have been thinking that for almost 20 years without actually setting foot on a court. The evidence would suggest that I’m not the only one.

When a country or city bids to host an international sporting event, it often promises that more people will take up sports as a result. London was no exception. Tessa Jowell, who helped to secure the 2012 Olympics for London, said they would be the first to set challenging but achievable targets as a measure of their ambition: By 2012 two million more people would be physically active. And 60 percent of young people would be doing at least five hours of sports per week.

In the end it did not turn out quite like that. Just over one-third of people in Britain take part in sports once a week. A report on Olympic and Paralympic legacy has said that a big change in participation levels simply has not happened.

Why isn’t there a big increase in people taking part in sports after most sporting events? Perhaps it is a mistake to assume an automatic link between watching sports and playing it. While the games are on, they actually encourage people to do just the opposite — to spend whole sunny days not out playing sports, but inside sitting on the sofa with the curtains shut to stop the sun shining on the TV screen and spoiling the view. We don’t expect half the audience of a hit musical to apply to drama school the next day, yet we seem to expect it of sporting events.

We might have sat on the sofa doing an impression of Usain Bolt’s bow-and-arrow signature pose. But how many of us have been inspired by watching him sprint (短跑) 100 meters? The high-level performances on show only remind people that they could never match the elite athletes in their sporting achievements even if they trained full time.

Maybe participation in sports is not the right legacy to expect after a major sporting event. It’s not so much that the Olympics failed to get people to participate but rather that this was never going to be the result. The Olympics can do many things, but maybe this cannot necessarily be one of them.