Capital of Sport

The Athens Olympics have come and gone and if you are anything like me, you must all have square eyeballs from watching too much TV, having said that I must admit that the staging of the games was absolutely fantastic, the Greek people should be very proud of the result. The Olympic Games of course went back home to where they started around 3000 years ago and to see all the historic buildings that are still standing was also wonderful. So I must say a big ‘thank you’ to the Greek people for bringing the beginning of the modern athletics into this world of ours.

Now I’m coming to the reason for writing this article, ‘Modern Athletics’. Which city in Great Britain is doing more to promote athletics and sport than any other city? Well it’s this City of ours, Manchester, as far as I’m concerned. For us locals who were ‘dragged’ up in this area and I’m talking about Beswick, Bradford, Clayton and Miles Platting. Sportcity runs into all these areas but of course the Town Hall now calls it East Manchester.

We have the Velodrome in Clayton, Manchester City of Football Club in Bradford, Regional Athletics Centre plus the Tennis centre in Beswick and Miles Platting.

The Regional Athletics Centre was host to the Olympic Trials and A.A.A. Championships in July and they were a great success. Both the Saturday and Sunday were a complete sell out and continuing on from their success we will now be staging the trials for the World Championships next year and also trials for the 2006 European Championships. One of the successes of the Olympic Trials was again the organisation by both the adult volunteers and also the young boys and girls who worked very hard to keep everything working on time. I think we can now call Manchester the ‘Capital of Sport’.
Alf Almond