Abstract
The Olympic Games are an established sports festival that garners a tremendous amount of public attention and awareness. The X Games and the Youth Olympic Games (YOG) are relatively new events that are targeted toward a younger audience. The purpose, of this study was to collect awareness and opinion data from undergraduate students in sport administration, exercise science and sport pedagogy from a university in the Midwestern United States regarding the then upcoming winter Youth Olympic Games, upcoming London Olympic Games and upcoming X-Games. The level of familiarity and public awareness of the 2012 Youth Olympic Games was generally very low ( mean scores for both were 1.9 out of 7.0). In contrast, the participants expressed more familiarity with X-Games as indicated by higher mean scores (4.4 and 4.6 measured out of 7.0, respectively). Similarly, the participants expressed greater familiarity with 2012 London Olympic Games as evidenced by higher mean scores (5.6 and 5.7 measured out of 7.0, respectively). The results of this study indicate that the social media campaign promoting the YOG may have missed the mark.