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Sharron
Davies
Olympic medallist swimmer turned celebrated broadcaster and sports campaigner talks to SportsNation about her quest to improve the quality of the UK’s leisure and sports facility stock
“I
we have a real problem on our hands. We’ve already lost 250 pools and leisure centres since the pandemic and, according to Sport England, another 1,000 could close by the end of the decade if we continue on this path. Many of our leisure centres are outdated
and in a shocking state of disrepair.” Davies, one of the UK’s best-known
and most popular sportswomen, knows what she’s talking about – not least because a considerable part of her life has been spent in a pool.
She burst onto the swimming scene as a 13-year-old Olympian in 1976 and instantly became a household name. Aged just 14,
she won two European Bronze medals, followed by a silver medal at the Moscow Olympics in 1980. Her incredible international career spanned three decades and included numerous major titles and medals, as well
as 200 British and Commonwealth records. Since retiring in 1994, after two decades
at the top level of her sport, she become
a regular on TV and in the press – most notably as a key member of BBC’s television coverage of major events. She has, either
as an athlete or broadcaster, covered
every single Olympic Games since 1976.
Now, she is on a mission to tackle what she calls a serious issue – the state of the UK’s sports and leisure centre infrastructure. She is as passionate about the future of grassroots swimming as she was about making it
to the podium during her elite career.
FACILITY ISSUES
“Some of the UK’s leisure stock is in crisis,” Davies says. “There were a lot of leisure facility projects in the 1970s and many of those venues were designed simply as boxes with activities crammed inside them – there wasn’t a lot of imagination when it came
to leisure centre architecture back then. “What’s happening is that many of
those centres are now at the end of their life. During the pandemic, many local authorities were struggling to run these ageing facilities, as they were outdated, weren't environmentally friendly and, as
a result, hugely expensive to run. The added financial pressures experienced at local level during COVID-19 – and the fact that the facilities weren’t generating any income – have hit the sector hard. To make things worse, sadly, we’re one of the few countries in Europe which don’t ringfence funding for leisure and physical activity facilities or services as a public service.
“As a result, we’ve lost 250 facilities and that is utterly ridiculous. Because let’s face it, we weren’t particularly well-served in
think we need an honest conversation about our facilities,” says Olympic medallist and
former Commonwealth Champion swimmer, Sharron Davies. “Because
sportsnation.org.uk
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