![]() ![]() Starting with a set of data in China, we counted the number of Chinese athletes who won gold medals at the 2016 Spring Olympics in Rio de Janeiro of prefecture-level cities according to the birthplace of the athletes, and it is obvious that there are fewer COVID-19 cases in regions with champions than those without champions ( Figure 1). Is there a correlation between the number of sports champions and the COVID-19 confirmed cases in a region? This is indeed an interesting question, and it seems that we can observe some evidence for it. ![]() Interestingly, it is greater in regions with less attention to sports, which again confirms the role of the demonstration effect. Further, we find that the effect is greater in regions with developed economies and abundant sports resources. An increase of one gold medal results in a 0.93% increase in the sports population, then leads to a 3.58% decrease in the cumulative case growth rate ( p < 0.01). The results show that the demonstration effect of champions in major sporting events increases the participation in physical exercise, which in turn reduces the possibility of being infected with the epidemic. The two-way fixed effect model of econometrics is applied to estimate the result, the instrumental variable approach is adopted to address potential endogeneity issues, and socio-economic factors including public health measures, residents’ self-protection awareness, effective distance from Wuhan are also taken into consideration. What kind of role do sports champions play in the COVID-19 epidemic? Do they contribute to the mitigation of the epidemic by some pathway? In this paper, we empirically explore the influence and mechanism of the demonstration effect of sports champions upon the COVID-19 epidemic using COVID-19-related dataset of prefecture-level cities in China from 1 January 2020 to 17 March 2020. ![]()
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