Pakistan’s hockey teams are heading to Cannock in Staffordshire. The Belarussian judo squad will be using the facilities at Tonbridge school in Kent. And for two weeks next month, the Forum sports complex in Antrim, Northern Ireland, will be the temporary home of the Egyptian athletics delegation.
London has entered the final stage of its preparations for the Olympics, and across Britain, scores of other towns and cities are also getting ready to welcome the world’s greatest athletes this summer. Encouraged by the organizer, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG), as part of its commitment to spread the Olympic legacy far beyond the capital, thousands of international competitors will spend the final few weeks before the Games training with their colleagues in pools, gyms and stadiums from Aberdeen to Plymouth, Swansea to Richmond-upon-Thames.
For the athletes, the pre-Games training camps will carve out a valuable space for them to bond with their teammates, perfect last-minute tweaks to their performance and acclimatize to whatever weather the British summer lays on for them.
However, for the communities that will host them, the camps offer an opportunity to participate in the buzz and claim a share in direct and indirect financial benefits totaling many millions of dollars — a prospect that has led to intense competition between councils, universities and sporting facilities across the country.
The need to supply training facilities for Olympic delegations from across the world has resulted in some unlikely cultural pairings. The Antiguan and Barbudan athletics squad, for example, will be based in the Guildford Spectrum in Surrey, while the Gambian delegation will be based at the Huntington athletics stadium at the University of York. And in Wrexham, north Wales, the council’s leisure manager, Ken Danskin, is making preparations to welcome the Olympic team from Lesotho, likely to number, at current estimates, between seven and nine athletes, plus a handful of officials.
Despite the modest size of the Lesotho delegation, Danskin says, the local sporting groups who may be called on to work with the athletes — providing a sparring partner, for instance, for the boxers who are expected to qualify — are “buzzing” at the prospect. Local school and community groups, too, are excited about the visit, meaning that one of the challenges for the council will be protecting the athletes from too many demands on their time.
“It’s not a huge team, so while we’re aware that they are going to have downtime, we have to be mindful of not over-pushing them into doing stuff,” Danskin said.
The competitors are spending only a fortnight at the Queensway sports ground in the middle of a Wrexham housing estate before heading for the Olympic village, but for the council, their presence is the culmination of years of determined lobbying.
In Wrexham’s case, and that of all the Welsh facilities seeking to host athletes, the decision was taken early on to lobby centrally through “a pre-Games training taskforce” set up by the Welsh assembly to attract international delegations to Wales.
A representative flew to Beijing in 2008, says Danskin, “to tout for business the same as most countries did in Europe, talking to national Olympic committees and saying: ‘Have you considered... ?’”
Perhaps inevitably, the world-class athletic and swimming facilities in Cardiff and Swansea, and the Wales National velodrome in Newport, attracted the bulk of the 19 Olympic and Paralympic delegations coming to Wales; in Wrexham’s case, the appeal to Lesotho may have been helped by long-standing educational links with the country. Queen ’Masenate Mohato Seeiso of Lesotho visited Maelor high school in 2010.
If the intense competition between communities to host an Olympic delegation can be explained in part by the cultural prestige and community benefits, the critical factor for many teams in choosing a British training base was financial.
In 2008, LOCOG published a list of 600 facilities across Britain that had applied for accreditation as approved potential training camp venues, attracted by the prospect of a grant of £25,000 (US$39,000) offered to every Olympic delegation willing to base itself in the UK.
“This is a real opportunity for communities across the UK to capitalize on the benefits that hosting 2012 offers,” then-Olympics minister Tessa Jowell said.
Though it has not published a comprehensive list of every facility that will host overseas athletes, more than 200 individual sporting delegations from 93 different nations have signed agreements to train in British facilities, LOCOG said in April, translating into more than £2.3 million spent directing the Olympic legacy into the heart of communities across the UK.
The £25,000 grant may have been “absolutely key” to Lesotho’s ability to come before the Games, and offer a welcome boost to Glyndwr University, formerly the North East Wales Institute of Higher Education, which will host the delegation in its student accommodation, but in other cases, the grant was of negligible consideration.
Birmingham is one of the biggest winners in the scramble to attract international delegations, having persuaded both the US and Jamaican track and field teams to base themselves in the city — though the two will train in strict isolation from each other.
If the smaller Olympic teams were eagerly fought over, says Steve Hollingworth, assistant director of sports and events for Birmingham city council, the competition to attract the best and highest profile athletics squads in the world was ferocious. The city first opened discussions with Team USA in 2006, he says, while a delegation from the city was invited to the Beijing camp in 2008 to get a sense of just how exacting the team’s standards were. A memorandum of understanding was signed the following year, subject to Birmingham making upgrades to its Alexander stadium — including remodeling the layout and re-laying the track — to bring it in line with the team’s expectations.
Birmingham was more than happy to comply, Hollingworth said.
“What you have to remember here is how hard it was to get the teams. From 2008, there were cities in the UK talking to the USA and Jamaica, and on the continent. Regularly. It was a bidding process, and therefore part of our bid was to offer as much as we could, within our budget restraints, to make sure they chose Birmingham,” he said.
The US squad, accordingly, will be offered the use of civic facilities free of charge.
Benita Fitzgerald Mosley, chief of sport performance for USA Track and Field, is unapologetic about making such demands.
“We want to make sure we get the most ideal location for our team, so we get started early. That obviously means world-class track and field facilities, but we also wanted to find great trails for our distance runners, weight room, training room, medical facilities and also potentially an indoor facility for inclement weather, and Birmingham had all that,” she said.
The athletes will stay in a central Birmingham hotel — though the city has not disclosed its identity for security reasons — where team officials have checked the strength of training-room floors to ensure they can bear the weight of two or more ice baths.
The smaller Jamaican team, meanwhile, will be based at Birmingham University, where they will stay in halls of residence in which a number of extra-long beds have been installed to accommodate the 1.96m-tall Usain Bolt and others.
While they were inevitably attracted by the university’s sporting facilities, the city’s multicultural heritage was also a factor, university director of sport Zena Wooldridge said.
“We’ll have a Jamaican chef coming in as well to work alongside them, but our own chefs are quite used to doing Jamaican food because we do a lot of weddings for the Jamaican community ... We’re going to make sure that every small component part is right, because it’s that that can determine whether it’s a gold medal or a silver medal,” she said.
Birmingham has calculated that hosting the teams will bring benefits worth £20 million to the city, but to Hollingworth, the value of their visit goes beyond the financial.
“Birmingham wants to be an international city, and having the fastest people on earth choose Birmingham reinforces us as a world class city of sport. And the world’s media will be here. Two weeks before the Games, we hope, the focus will be on Birmingham, not London,” Hollingworth said.
Meanwhile, in Wrexham, the council has been given an organizational headache of the most welcome kind. The Lesothan Swimming Association confirmed last week that it plans to send a swimmer, Masempe Theko, though she has yet to decide which stroke to compete in, according to the association’s general-secretary. However, Wrexham does not have an Olympic-length (50m) pool. They will try to work something out with Stockport or Liverpool, a spokeswoman said.
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