K2 bidding to bring the Olympics to Crawley

K2 bidding to bring the Olympics to Crawley

IMAGINE this. It's the year 2012, you walk into K2 Leisure Centre in Crawley to use the fitness suite and in front of you at reception stand a group of tall, tanned athletic-looking people in green tracksuits.

Their accents betray their origins. It's the Australian national swimming squad. Seems unusual, but becomes less so as you walk around the building.

In the gymnasium, the Chinese gymnastics squad are spinning and vaulting over the apparatus. Out on the athletics track, Great Britain's 4x100m relay team are practising their changeovers and in the sports hall the Canadian basketball team are engrossed in a tough training session.

It sounds like fantasy but this vision could become reality in the year of the London Olympic Games if K2's centre manager Steve Warriner gets his way.

Thousands of athletes will travel to Britain for the Games in five years' time and all of them will need somewhere to acclimatise and blow out the cobwebs to arrive at their respective competitions in peak condition.

Warriner believes the state-of-theart facilities at K2 can persuade the world's most talented sports-people to choose Crawley for their final Olympic preparations.

"I would say to them, come with me and I'll show you round,"he says. "I'd let the place speak for itself. I don't think you can say anything which does the place justice unless you have seen it.

"For me, there are a number of 'wow' factors at K2. There is the pool hall, the size of the main sports hall, which is immense, and the climbing wall which is a massive feature of the building. You see these things and think, 'I want to come and use this place'."

He speaks the truth. Last year a whopping 1.2 million visitors passed through the K2 turnstiles, roughly double the annual tally for the old Crawley Leisure Centre.

It is easy to see why this modern facility has been such a hit with the local community.

It includes an eight-lane floodlit athletics track with grandstand, an Olympic sized swimming pool with diving and play areas, a fitness suite, five squash courts, an indoor bowls rink, a climbing wall, a gymnastics hall, a martial arts room, conference facilities and a vast main sports hall that contains 12 bad minton courts.

Including all the improvements to surrounding roads and local transport infrastructure, the whole project cost a cool £37 million but looking around you can't help but feel that Crawley Borough Council have got their money's worth.

For that price, K2 had to be well used and it is - thanks to links established with local schools and sports teams as well as those from further afield.

The gymnastics arena is leased to the Hawth Gymnastics club while the climbing wall is also leased out to a private enterprise. In addition, Thomas Bennett Community College have an agreement with K2 enabling their students to use part of the sports hall, the all weather pitches, the tennis courts and aerobics studios as part of their PE curriculum.

Crawley Athletics and Swimming clubs also use the track as a strong candidate to become an Olympic training venue.

It has staged a European boxing event, the British Judo Championships, international Thai double application for it to become a training venue for teams in the 2012 Olympics.

One application has been made by K2 on its own and another as part of the Gatwick Diamond consortium of sports venues. Both bids have gone to the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) and a decision is due to be made on which venues will be given training ground status in January 2008.

The Gatwick Diamond group is a boxing, an U19 national badminton tournament, the table tennis national grand prix and IAPS swimming galas.

And on August 16 and 17 this year, basketball fans will have a chance to see NBA star Luol Deng in action at K2 when the Great Britain basketball team play two matches against Ireland as they warm up for qualification for London 2012.

Such events, Warriner believes, are a sign that the country and wider world are now aware of what Crawley has to offer in a sporting sense.

"The old Crawley Leisure Centre was well known on a regional scale but K2 has taken that onto the next level," he says.

"It has raised Crawley's profile and people are coming to talk to us in terms of hosting national events. But for some people it is not about K2 hosting the world karate championships, it's about whether they can come and use the facility."

K2's growing reputation as a first-class sports venue has provided a platform for Warriner to make a Sussex collection of sports venues comprising K2, Christ's Hospital School and Bluecoat Sports Club, East Grinstead Sports Club, Olympos Burgess Hill, the showjumping course at Hickstead and the Nivea Sun Yellowave Venue in Brighton.

In June a series of sporting events were staged to showcase each venue including the regional judo championships at K2, and Warriner feels the watching VIPs would have been impressed with what they saw.

"I think they would have seen that the facilities are big enough to cope with large scale activities," he says.

"But the facility we have can cater for so many different sports and so it gives us so many options. That's the positive thing.

"We have a good diversity of facilities so for us, between now and Beijing, it's about holding good events and truly quality products.

"We are in a good position in that we have applied and our facilities are up and running whereas other applicants have applied when their facilities are still being built.