The 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China emphasized building a Digital China and accelerating the digital economy. The "14th Five-Year Plan for Sports" proposed constructing a digital sports project with four platforms and one center, drawing significant academic and industry attention to the digital development of mass fitness events. However, research on digital sports events remains limited, focusing mainly on broadcasting and technology applications. This study explores the challenges of high-quality development in digital mass fitness events and proposes pathways for digital enhancement. Using literature review, logical reasoning, and semi-structured interviews to define the concept of digital sports events and examine the practical challenges and development strategies for digital mass fitness events, aiming to provide recommendations for innovation in China’s sports sector. Digital national fitness events represent transformative integrations of sports competitions with digital economy principles, defined as: end-to-end digital transformation of athletic events, enhancing organizational efficiency, management efficacy, and spectator engagement through intelligent technologies. Four critical barriers emerge:1)Technological Barriers: An imbalance between digital and sports talent, with shortages and unresolved "bottleneck" technologies.2)Lack of Standards: No unified criteria for event access and operations, leading to implementation risks.3)Regulatory Lag: Hindered by the "digital divide" and "information barriers," digital sports events lack scale and require improved regulations.4)Practical Limitations: Insufficient technology empowerment, limited sports scenarios, and venue constraints. To address these, the study proposes four strategies:1)Develop "Digital + Sports" Talent: Establish a government-enterprise-school collaboration mechanism to cultivate sports intelligent engineering courses.2)Create Event Standards: Define digital sports event characteristics and develop tiered organizational standards.3)Enhance Supervision: Develop organizational solutions for events of varying scales, focusing on competition rules and funding sources.4)Enrich Sports Scenarios: Reduce operational costs, secure funding through investment, and create high-quality digital and visualized events to strengthen the sports industry chain. Against the backdrop of an advancing digital economy, Digital China, and sports powerhouse construction, the integration of sports events has created a new field of digital sports. This study proposes four strategies for high-quality development, providing theoretical support and guidance for the widespread implementation of digital sports events in China.
Fei et al. (2026) studied this question.