Abstract:Taking 31 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government) in China as the research object, based on the statistics of the medals of the 13th National Games from 1959 to 2017, a variety of mathematical statistics methods and geospatial analysis methods were used, this paper studies the space-time pattern and evolution process of competitive sports strength in China in the past 60 years from the perspective of time and space. The results show that: 1 80% of China's competitive sports strength level division is medium and low level, and high level area only accounts for 20%. There are obvious regional differences in the eastern, central and western regions, showing a trend of gradual decline from the eastern coastal areas to the inland areas in the west. 2 The absolute gap in competitive sports strength of provinces, cities and districts shows an expanding trend, and the relative gap shows a downward trend. The polarization of inter-provincial competitive sports is becoming more and more serious, and the imbalance of regional development has improved slightly, but the magnitude is not large. 3 China's competitive sports strength shows a spatial pattern of high east and low west. The center of gravity is concentrated in the spatial scope of the three provinces of Shandong, Henan and Anhui, showing a trend of moving to the southeast. 4 Since the National Games in 2005, the spatial distribution of China's competitive sports strength has shown significant positive spatial correlation, showing the characteristics of “high-high” and “low-low” clustering distribution of neighboring provinces and cities (districts). In the course of 60 years of development, the Northeast region experienced a process of “strong-weak-strong”, while the central region experienced the process of “weak-strong-weak”, and the eastern region was gradually enhanced, while the west the region is always in a weak state. The HH and LL types are concentrated in the eastern and western regions respectively, and the LH types are mainly concentrated in the central region. The HL types are scattered and distributed in all four regions.