"Sports centres and swimming pools that should be helping millions regain fitness have been left crumbling and neglected, a bleak watchdog report found yesterday. [LINK]

At a time of growing crisis over poor health and obesity among both children and adults, the standard of public sports facilities is poor and getting worse despite £1 billion a year budget, it said.

The scathing findings from the Audit Commission blamed incompetent and indifferent town hall bureaucrats and a reluctance to spend money on sport as chief reasons for delapidation and decline.

It warned that despite widespread enthusiasm over the 2012 Olympics, the number of new sports centres getting built is actually going down.

Lottery money to pay for new ones is drying up, it added.

More than two out of three pools and leisure complexes are more than two decades old, the investigation found."

But the Audit Commission said that public sector sports facilities were making 'slow and uncertain' progress; that few bureaucrats had bothered to work out what people needed and might want in the future; and that local council running of pools and sports centres was 'weak'. ...

The report was published in the wake of Labour's latest initiative to encourage children to take exercise, a £5.5 million scheme for swimming lessons for 11-year-olds who cannot manage 25 yards. Critics of the plan this week said it was hard to teach swimming to children who have no local pool. ...

Councils had made money from contracting out pools and leisure centres to be run by private companies but had failed to plough it back into new facilities.

(Via Sports funding wasted by town hall chiefs | the Daily Mail: .)

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| in the news | 3 February 2008; 1:19:28 AM |# | | Discuss |

"The London 2012 Olympic legacy is under threat due to a coaching shortage, according to a new report.

The report, released by Sportnation – an independent sports think-tank – based on research carried out by Loughborough University, said that even on conservative estimates, the UK could face a shortfall of up to a quarter of a million full-time and part-time paid professional sports coaches.

The study, called Are we missing the coach for 2012?, found that 69 per cent of the 1.2 to 1.5 million sports coaches in the UK are unpaid volunteers and that in performance athletics, there are as few as 12 full-time salaried coaches in the UK.

It calls for between 160,000 and 233,500 additional paid, professional coaching positions by 2016, which is more ambitious than the proposed 42,000 new positions to be created in the same period under Sportscoach UK’s UK Coaching Framework.

Steve Cram, chair of the Sportnation – which is supported by the Lucozade Sports Science Academy --– and former world champion athlete, said: ‘The report highlights that unless we can break the culture of ‘gentleman amateurism’ in UK sport, we will struggle to become best in the world.

‘As long as we continue to rely on an army of grass-roots volunteers, with no clear career progression for home grown coaches, we will tend to look to superannuated foreign coaches to fill the top jobs in UK sport. If we don’t act now to stem the endemic culture of volunteerism in UK sport, we may have already missed the coach for sporting success at London 2012.’ Details: www.thelssa.co.uk/lssa/sportnation/ "

(Via Leisure Opportunities - daily jobs, news, training and property: .)

| olympic news | 3 February 2008; 1:17:14 AM |# | | Discuss |