THE HERALD REPORTS

Pride and passion make champions, not grand designs
DRIVING over dirt roads in the Rift Valley last week, I took a call from BBC Scotland. They wanted some live input to a debate on the sell-off of Edinburgh's athletics field of dreams.

Meadowbank, home of two Commonwealth Games, in 1970 and 1986, is to be bulldozed.

Athletes, coaches, and followers of the sport are incensed. So are many other sports users.

There is a widely held view that lack of investment by Edinburgh Leisure in refurbishment has been deliberate.

This facility cost barely £2m at the end of the 1960s. It's now going to cost some £85m to replace. This does not sound like great economics. Doubtless the Royal Commonwealth Pool would also be bulldozed if they could get away with it. It's prime land, but the building is listed. So it has to be refurbished.

Meadowbank is not. Lack of use there has been encouraged in every way: antique fairs making it impossible on occasion to use it for athletics meetings. The throwing area at the rear has had grass so long that one Olympic competitor, Shirley Webb, was forced to tie supermarket plastic bags to the handle of the hammer so that they could be found.

I could go on. And those on air did, giving the city's representative a torrid time. The city view is that sport in Edinburgh is getting a state-of-the-art facility. But sport with no regard for history or heritage is sport without a soul.

This is where Lachie Stewart beat Ron Clarke, greatest endurance man of the age, to win 1970 gold.

It's where Stewart and McCafferty ran the third and fourth-best times ever to deny legendary Olympic champion Kip Keino, and where Liz McColgan won the first ever international 10,000m title by a woman. Is this worth preserving? Apparently not.

I am no Luddite drawn obsessively to the past, which I suspect may be the view of those determined to move. Yet I never got a satisfactory answer from Edinburgh's representatives to my point that the iconic Berlin stadium built for the 1936 Olympics was successfully upgraded for last year's football World Cup. Or that the Stockholm stadium, built for the 1912 Olympics, the 1932 Los Angeles Coliseum, and the 1952 Helsinki arena, are all still in use, classic features of their cities. If they can do it, why can't Edinburgh?

They say the city deserves better facilities. So it does. But earlier that day I had watched Kenyans training at the Keino stadium in Eldoret.

The world's greatest athletes train for and win glory in what Scots would consider a slum. The inside lane is rutted as deep as a cyclocross track. It's a burnt dustbowl. The accommodation is pitiful.

Outside, in a vast area of waste ground, maize lies on sheets, drying in the sun.

Barely 15 miles away, at Iten, 200 athletes at a time train on a track covered in cattle manure, and dodge the animals. The steeplechase water jump is lethal. Yet Kenya has the greatest steeplechasers in the world.

In a country where children die for want of £3.10 to treat malaria, there are clearly higher priorities. But it's not facilities which make cham-pions. It is pride. It is passion. It is will, and hunger. Even hunger for the basics of life.

Athletics has given financial security to legions of Kenyans. Our lottery-driven society is soft.

I feel like a hypocrite pleading for better facilities in Edinburgh, wherever they may be. Kenyan sport is is skint, yet their spirit and determination is something money can never buy.

10:21pm today



By DOUG GILLON

This article was posted on 26-Feb-2007, 08:09 by Hugh Barrow.