The competitive advantage of an organisation arises from the resources and capabilities that are in place within the organisation. Competitive advantage leads to strategic success and a lack of it leads to a lack of success. Using the resource-based view of developing competitive advantage, this paper aims to investigate why many National Olympic Committees (NOCs) do not appear to be successful at the Olympic Games. It does this by investigating the resources and capabilities of the national federations (NFs) that are responsible for developing the athletes that are the main resource of the NOCs. The underlying premise of this research is that the competitive advantage of an NOC is reliant on the ability of their NFs to produce athletes who can be competitive on a world stage. The NFs within three Pacific countries were audited using the Readiness Assessment Tool developed to assess their resources, structures and capabilities. The research shows that the NFs under investigation were not sufficiently developed to create competitive advantage due to poor resources and low levels of capability. Therefore, there is a need for these NFs to develop further as organisations through 'knowledge transfer', the leveraging of resources and capacity-building through alliances with other organisations or countries that are better placed to produce elite athletes

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to set out research that aimed to understand how the internal capabilities of Olympic sport organisations can be addressed. Design/methodology/approach -The research was carried out by a mixed-method, multi phase approach, using senior sport administrators in the Pacific region. Findings -The research developed a tool for analysing the "readiness" of sport organisations to deliver programmes and services. Research limitations/implications -This research has developed a framework for the internal diagnosis of organisations. Practical implications -Managers can use the tool to inform their strategic planning. Originality/value -The paper presents a new and unique tool for assessing organisational capacity.

This article proposes a framework that explains how a national association sport policy is operationally formalised in relation with the various perceptions of its internal stakeholders. This is an important issue as a lack of engagement from these stakeholders may result in a limited impact of such a sport policy. Considering the latter as a management tool, a case study of the French Rugby Union (FFR) was built using archival material and interviews. We demonstrated that a national sport federation policy, when viewed as a management tool is the consequence of a conceptual framework, consisting of: a formal substrate, a managerial philosophy and a simplified representation of the actors' role (Hatchuel & Weil, 1992). As part of an intervention-research within the FFR, 45 semi-structured interviews were conducted with both national and regional actors with various statutes. The analysis of these interviews shows both agreement and contradictions, categorized through the conceptual framework used to explain that a "one size fits all" approach should enable a degree of regional freedom for sport governing bodies that include organisational membership.

No abstract