ABSTRACT
The elite sports policies of nations have one common aim: to perform successfully against the best athletes, mostly during international competitions. In spite of increasing competition and high investments in elite sports systems by many countries, an optimum strategy for delivering international success is still unclear and complicated to realise. This makes it difficult for sports managers and policymakers to prioritise and to make the right choices in elite sports policy. In this chapter, we present an overview and account of the development of a conceptual framework: the Sports Policy factors Leading to International Sporting Success, also known as the SPLISS model (De Bosscher, De Knop, van Bottenburg and Shibli, 2006). This model is the result of joint efforts of a consortium group of international researchers established in 2002. That group wanted to develop a model that could be used by policymakers and high-performance managers to compare and benchmark nations in elite sport; to measure the performances of their organisations; and to evaluate the effectiveness of national elite sport policies (De Bosscher et al., 2006). The model was subsequently tested in an empirical environment first with six and then later with fifteen nations. While the model addresses the evaluation at the national level of elite sport policy, how it can be implemented at other levels has also been explored; for example, by national governing bodies (in specific sports), for regional elite sport development, in cities or by digging deeper into specific policy areas (Pillars).
