Brisbane 2032: Turning games excitement into lifelong participation

By Anna Walker, From Now On Sport Consultancy

The leaders working on Brisbane 2032 legacy right now are managing some of the most consequential social infrastructure in the country. Their decisions today - and every day over the next six years - will determine whether these Games become a genuine turning point for participation and diversity in Australian sport, or whether they inspire a generation to watch, without building the systems to make them stay.

That distinction is worth being precise about.

The ambition is real. Now comes the hard part.

Elevate 2042 is a serious piece of work. The IOC and IPC described it as setting a new global benchmark for legacy thinking. Its vision - an inclusive, sustainable and connected society, with more opportunities for everyone - reflects a genuine commitment to use Brisbane 2032 as a catalyst for long-term social change.

The $30 million Games On! Grassroots Infrastructure Program is already flowing into Queensland clubs and communities. The intent is sound: invest early, improve access, build readiness before the torch is lit. Better facilities matter. More supported volunteers matter.

But infrastructure and volunteering alone have never been sufficient to produce a participation legacy. The evidence on this is now too consistent to set aside.

What the evidence actually says

Dr Shushu Chen, University of Birmingham, has spent years examining whether major sporting events deliver on their participation promises. Her research across the London 2012 and Beijing 2008 Olympics found that watching elite athletes does not reliably change participation behaviour. When she examined the full range of factors that drive whether people actually play sport - time, money, confidence, access, belonging - the "Olympic impact" ranked among the least influential. Her conclusion: legacy promises must be realistic, and there is a need for proactive planning and concrete mechanisms beyond hosting events and building stadiums.¹

The 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup illustrated this domestically. Registration inquiries spiked. Club phones rang. The systems weren't ready. Capacity was constrained, formats were unchanged, and the window closed before most of that interest converted.

Inspiration creates intent. Systems determine whether intent becomes sustained participation. A participation legacy built on event staging alone is not a legacy, it is a temporary lift.¹ If Brisbane 2032 inspires 100,000 people to try a sport, but 70,000 leave within 12 months, have we succeeded? If our clubs remain inaccessible to women, culturally diverse communities, people with disability and lower-income families, have we succeeded?

Games On! is not misguided. But we will fill better facilities with the same cohort we've always served, unless we also change what happens inside them.

The shift we need to make

The participation problem in Australian sport has never been a shortage of infrastructure. It has been a shortage of system design oriented around the people we are losing.

AusPlay data tells us participation peaks between ages 9 and 14, then declines sharply through adolescence - particularly among girls. Up to 70% of Australian teens have dropped out of organised sport by their mid-teens.² Young people are not rejecting sport. They are responding rationally to systems that were not designed with their needs at the centre.

The current architecture of Australian sport pathways rests on a clear directional endpoint: Mastery. Australia's FTEM framework - Foundations, Talent, Elite, Mastery - maps development stages and cautions against early specialisation, but its destination is still elite performance. Everything downstream aligns accordingly: how players are grouped, how game time is allocated, how success is defined, who governs.

In a pre-Games environment, that endpoint risks becoming even more pronounced. Elite focus intensifies before a home Games. The pull toward performance is real, and without deliberate counterweight, the system will lean further in that direction, not because of bad intent, but because that is what the current architecture rewards.

The counterweight is retention. And here is what makes this case strategically compelling, not just ethically important: Norway's Children's Rights in Sport - which prohibits score-keeping before age 11 and national championships before age 13 - has produced a 93% youth participation rate and a consistently elite Olympic performance. At the 2018 Winter Olympics, a nation of 5.4 million won more medals than any other country. Not despite the participation focus, but because of it. A wider talent pool, chosen at the point at which participants are physically mature and talent realistically identifiable, produces better athletes. Retention and performance are not in competition, they are the same investment.³

The specific behaviours that drive young people away are well documented. Training drills structured so that the loser goes to the back of the line. Children benched not because they're developing but because they're not yet winning. Academies splitting eight-year-olds by perceived 'talent'. Research shows children who perceive preferential treatment suffer diminished self-worth, reduced enjoyment, and a higher likelihood of dropout because the system sent them a clear message about their value.⁴

The precise shift required is this: high-quality sporting experience must exist for everyone, not only for those progressing toward performance outcomes. Recreational competition, social sport and non-competitive formats need to be genuinely resourced and valued, not consolation prizes for those who didn't make the cut. This is where belonging is built. And belonging, alongside enjoyment and perceived competence, is one of the three most consistent predictors of whether young people stay.⁵

FTEM's foundations are strong. The endpoint needs a counterpart: retention, sitting alongside Mastery with equal strategic weight.

The measurement problems that needs solving before 2032

Registration numbers and medals won are outputs of a system. They tell us almost nothing about the environment and culture that produce them - or fail to. If we want those outputs to grow and sustain, we need to start measuring what drives them.

The known drivers of participation retention are not contested. Belonging, social connection, enjoyment, perceived competence, safety - these are what keep people in sport across age groups, backgrounds and ability levels. They are what sport means to the 99.97% of participants who will never reach elite representation.

And they are precisely what current measurement frameworks do not capture.

What government has the authority to do - and what the still-open Elevate 2042 implementation planning window makes possible - is embed these measures now. Not as supplementary indicators, but as primary ones. Retention rates tracked alongside registration numbers. Participant experience reported in every quarterly accountability framework. Dropout made visible, investigated and addressed.

This is not a measurement exercise for its own sake. It is a reorientation of what the system is optimised to produce. Systems produce what they measure. Right now, we are measuring inputs and outputs for the minority. Registrations in, medals won. To produce sustainable growth, the kind that builds the broad base from which elite performance also emerges, we need to measure the experience of the many.

And there's a wider play here. Because governments aren't lying awake at night worrying about sport participation rates. They're worrying about physical inactivity. Mental health. Social isolation. Community connection. Outcomes we inherently know sport contributes to but cannot reliably prove. If we want governments to take sport seriously, these are the metrics that must lead our story.

Sports leaders don't need to wait for governments to pivot first. Those who get ahead of the game now will open doors to new investors and partners others won't even be thinking about.

The implementation planning for Elevate 2042 is still in progress. This is the window.

The legacy will not be achieved by doing more of the same

More facilities. More volunteers. More campaigns directed at communities whose prior experience of organised sport gave them every rational reason to leave. These are not wrong investments, but insufficient ones. They improve the conditions for the existing system. They do not redesign it.

The 2032 Games will produce a wave of inspiration. What is not yet determined is whether the systems those inspired people encounter will be ready to receive them and whether those systems will have been designed to make them feel like they belong. The real test of success will not be what happens during two weeks of competition. It will be in 2042 when we consider if Queenslanders and Australians are more active, connected and involved in sport than they are today.

The design work is not untested. The evidence base, the international models and the sector expertise all exist. What is required now is the structural commitment to measure, govern and invest differently. To build new foundations for a system that defines success by who stays, not just who arrives.

That is the legacy worth building. And it starts now.

What does your organisation need to change first?

Anna Walker is Founder and Director of From Now On Sport Consultancy, working at the intersection of participation, inclusion, data and impact. She is currently working with sports leaders within Australia and across the globe to translate Participant-Led Systems principles into practice.

anna@fromnowon.com.au | fromnowon.com.au

References

1. Chen, S. (2023). Social Impacts and Legacies of Major Sporting Events. City-REDI Blog, University of Birmingham. Birmingham Economic Review 2022.

2. Australian Sports Commission (2025). AusPlay National Data Tables, January–December 2024. Canberra: ASC.

3. Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports (NIF). Children's Rights in Sport. Oslo: NIF.

4. Brandon University. Favouritism in Competitive Sports: Relationships with General Self-Worth and Positive Experiences.

5. Aspen Institute (2022). State of Play 2022: Trends and Developments in Youth Sports. Washington DC.