Abstract: In order to explore residents’ willingness to participate in traditional ethnic sports events, this paper takes the 11th Ethnic Minority Sports Meeting in Yunnan Province as a case and uses structural equation model to explain the relationship between the comprehensive impact perception of traditional ethnic sports events and the residents’ attitude towards the events and their willingness to participate. The result shows: 1) the perception difference to people’s traditional sports has positive influence on cognitive relation, but the economic benefit, environmental benefit and urban identity perception do not while social benefit has positive influence on perception of city identity relationship; and 2) there is also relationship between the three factors affecting attitude, that is, traditional sports cognition has a positive impact on urban identity and also has a positive impact on behavioral intention, and there is a positive impact between urban identity and behavioral intention.

Key words: benefit perception, attitude, willingness to participate, national sports event