Nowadays, Qingdao is seeing a continuous stream of sport events with distinctive features including fitness-for-all programs of all kinds, professional events and specially branded ones. “Touring while watching or attending sport events” has emerged as a popular trend on Qingdao’s sport tourism market for 2024, and is gaining fame.

The 2024 Qingdao Marathon, which kicked off on April 21, became the first event to send greetings to tourists. The “most beautiful marathon” attracted the participation of more than 100,000 running enthusiasts.

Over recent years, Qingdao, one of national pilot cities for sports consumption, has launched a number of popular sporting events. Among them is the “Qingdao Cup” fashionable sport league, the first one in China, which combines in an innovative manner such popular fashionable sports among the youth as baseball and softball, flag football and extreme frisbee, and has now grown into the most influential and professional one, with the participation of well-recognized contestants, among all such events in China. This year, the “Qingdao Cup” plans to launch more ten relatively obscure fashionable sport events.

Moreover, Qingdao will sponsor 221 municipal-level above sport events in the remainder of 2024, including 11 international-level ones and 58 national-level ones, and launch community-level sports meetings among more than 610 residential communities.

To enable contestants and audiences to better enjoy Qingdao’s fabulous scenery, hotels, food and performances in a more convenient and less costly manner when blood-and-thunder competitions conclude, Qingdao will continue to roll out a slew of favorable policies on “touring while watching sport events”, pick out well sought-after sports tourism events and put up a platform for “watching international sporting events in Qingdao”. With priority given to sporting events, Qingdao will work hard to build a larger quantity of new scenarios for sport tourism consumption, which are immersive experience-based, interactive and inclusive, roll out a wide range of sport tourism products including sporting events+performances, scenic spots, hotels, festival celebrations and delicacies, and create a new mode integrating multiple tourism elements such as eating, lodging, sightseeing, shopping and recreation to diversify the options of cultural and sports tourism consumption.

(Xu Nuo)

One game of Qingdao Hainiu football team draws the visit of a large number of fans. By Wang Lei