Too many pessimists around i fear….. 🙁

How many leisure centres and swimming pools are there? Bloody thousands. Against FOUR velodromes. Ten years ago there weren’t any, were there?

Yes, but go back 20 years and there were loads.

Middlesborough and Leicster just 2 towns near where I’ve lived where I’d have liked to use them but they’d already fallen into disrepair.

Same pattern up and down the country.

What we need for mass participation is more facilities for normal people. It’s all well and good having 5 £10million velodromes and an indoor BMX track costing £8million. But for the same cost could we not have had 50 outdoor velodromes (I’ve no idea what one cost, let’s say £1,000,000 which is probably vastly over) and 32 national sized (Derby cost £250,000 Vs Manchesters indoor track at £8,000,000) BMX tracks? They wouldn’t help the BC team, but it would help the greater population.

To use football as an example, building another indoor venue is like adding a government/council/lottery/whatever funded team to the premiership, when what they goverment/council/lottery does do is spend that money on hundreds of football pitches in parks. I think there should be a limit on what the governing bodies can spend on ‘pro’ facilities and what they have to spend on grass rootes participation.

Moving back to Reading next month so intending to get a track bike and join Palmer Park for a bit of fun.

Yes, but go back 20 years and there were loads.

There were loads of outdoor ones in the 40s and 50s, but no indoor ones surely?

access is going to be very limited, and probably quite expensive.

Access has to be limited to an extent cos there’s a safety issue. I live near the Newport one, and it has been extremely difficult to find out about how to ride and race. Really off-putting. Trickydisco helped me out recently which has helped. But even then the racing scene seems to be rubbish with naff all going on.

I think that once the Olympic honeymoon is over, the initial surge in enthusiasm created by TV and media coverage has worn off, and the colder wetter weather is back with us, we will see a sharp decline in the level of interest in sports.

this to me is what the legacy is really about. It’s not crying olympians with medals of various hues, or bricks and mortar venues, great and welcome as they all are. It’s about the likes of you and me, middle aged parents mainly (apologies to those that aren’t), getting off our arses and getting our kids interested in sports, enrolled in clubs, and ferried the length and breadth of our fair land participating.

I honestly believe there is a sport for just about everyone, and now’s the right time to find the one that will enthuse your kids in a way that means sport / exercise is something to be enjoyed as a way of life rather than endured for an afternoon a wekk at school. Lessons learnt now will stay with them. And the true legacy will be measured not by our medal haul in the Kabul 2036 games, but by a sustainable decrease in obesity and associated issues in our population as a whole.

And if we get that right – then the medals will keep rolling in as well.