A £29 million funding package was unveiled yesterday (£22 million from North Lanarkshire Council and developers Ravenscraig Limited; £7m from the government)
£29m regional training centre to be built on Ravenscraig steelworks site by 2009
JONATHAN COATES
RAVENSCRAIG, once the lifeblood of Lanarkshire with its gigantic steelworks, could be an emblem of a very different sort of human achievement in 2012, as a training centre for athletes at the London Olympics.
A £29 million funding package was unveiled yesterday (£22 million from North Lanarkshire Council and developers Ravenscraig Limited; £7m from the government) as construction begins on the latest of Sportscotland's ten long-awaited regional sports centres. A state-of-the-art facility is due for completion in 2009 on 18 acres of the site of the former steelworks, a giant of heavy industry, which employed 6,000 at its heyday but which closed down in 1992, decimating the local economy.
Stewart Maxwell, the Communities and Sports Minister, said that Ravenscraig would not only fill a gap in public leisure facilities in the Motherwell-Wishaw corridor but also meet the requirements of the world's finest athletes.
When the Olympic movement congregates in London in 2012 the Scottish Government wants to be involved, despite a row over the allocation of an estimated £150m of lottery funding away from Scottish good causes and into the London pot.
Mr Maxwell said yesterday he was eager not only to promote Ravenscraig as a preparatory venue for competitors in action in London, but also in Glasgow two years later. The centre has not been part of the city's bid to stage the 2014 Commonwealth Games but the Minister said that giving the green light to such projects would only extend Glasgow's lead over Abuja when the Commonwealth nations submit their votes in Sri Lanka a week on Friday.
"What we have here is a facility that will be top-class," said Mr Maxwell. "Hopefully it will be used by elite athletes, as a training venue for 2012 and, I hope, 2014, if Glasgow wins the bid. It will also be a great facility for ordinary people in the local community.
"We are absolutely delighted that the Olympics are coming to London and we are fully supportive of our athletes to get to the Olympics. We expect them to do well. But the fact is we do not support the use of lottery money being taken from Scotland, being taken out of good causes and charities and local grass-roots sport, to fund the regeneration of a huge swathe of London. It seems to me entirely reasonable that the Treasury should pay for that.
"We will make sure we try to do everything we can to assist areas in Scotland that want to be training bases in 2012 and, of course, 2014. The only problem is the use of lottery funding.
"This particular site would be an excellent training facility for teams that come here for 2014, if we are successful in next week's announcement. It is very close to Glasgow and it will be brand new, top-of-the-range facilities. Athletes could base themselves here and this training venue will be an excellent addition to the bid.
"The countries that will be voting next week should take on board the commitment we have to sport in Scotland."
Inside a 5,000-seater arena, Ravenscraig will house a synthetic football pitch and six-lane athletics track, field event training areas, nine racket courts, a gym, two dance studios and an indoor soft play area. Outside, there will be a floodlit artificial football pitch and six five-a-side pens.
When the proposal for a network of ten regional centres was unveiled in 2004, £5m of the £50m pot of public money was allocated to Ravenscraig. The application subsequently rose to £7m, a bill that will be met by £4.97m of Exchequer funding and £2.03m of lottery funds.
One day the Ravenscraig sports centre will be swallowed on the skyline by a new town, complete with shopping centre and college. The sports hall itself is expected to double as a concert venue, but Mark Foster, Sportscotland's senior programme manager for national regional sports facilities, said local football clubs and other professional athletes should consider its merits as a daytime training venue.
"It's an important project, not just in terms of regeneration of the local area but because of the part it will play in a network of multi-sports facilities across Scotland," said Foster. "We set out on this journey in 2004. We had hoped to be further on than where we are.
"However, the complexity and scale and size of these projects is emphasised by the difficulties we have had getting this one to this point.
"By the end of this financial year, we will be pretty much at the end of getting 'Stage Two' approvals for all ten projects."
Ravenscraig has had to overcome obstacles such as a planning dispute with nearby retailers that went to the House of Lord's and the threat posed to a family of ringed plover birds, which had to be given a new habitat in time for nesting season last March.
As for the sports centre, though, Foster admitted that there was nothing like the onset of an Olympics on the doorstep to get politicians moving.
Story so far
IN 2004, the Scottish Executive committed £50 million in order to have 11 state-of-the-art sports centres up and running by 2011.
£7m has been committed to Aberdeen's Linksfield and the same amount to the Ravenscraig development near Motherwell. Stirling's Forthbank sports village has received £2.5m.
Glasgow will soon benefit from an upgrade of the Scotstoun Stadium a new indoor football centre at Toryglen
and a National Indoor Arena and velodrome, which will be Commonwealth Games venues in 2014 if Glasgow's bid is successful.
Falkirk has been promised a new indoor football facility at the Westfield Stadium, but adversity has haunted the refurbishment of the Royal Commonwealth Pool and two further projects in Edinburgh.
