Future Cairns: What are the chances of a Cairns athlete at the Brisbane 2032 Olympics?
Cairns has no shortage of self-belief among young athletes. But experts know it takes more than talent and dreams to see FNQ represented at Olympic level. What needs to be done.
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CAIRNS doesn’t have a shortage of Olympic ambition or potential among its emerging crop of athletes, but whether or not it has the training facilities and competitive opportunity is a different, and possibly limiting, matter.
Lewis Williams is among several juniors with talent and the medals to show for it. In ten years, he wants to make the big time.
“I want to be running the 1500m at the Brisbane Olympics,” he said.
The 10-year-old is on the right path, having won a cross-country event at a recent national competition.
His slightly elder peer Kaitlyn McGee, 14, who has also tasted recent success, wants to carry the Australian flag beside him in 2032.
“Olympic track athletes trained here before they went to Tokyo. It was good to see their standard,” she said.
The junior athletes are fortunate enough to have Jill Boltz, a two-time olympian, as their coach.
“We have got some excellent kids,” Ms Boltz said.
“Everybody has the potential, but it’s not going to be smooth sailing.”
Ms Boltz said Cairns’ shorter amount of competition, relative to the state’s southeast corner, is a disadvantage to FNQ youth.
“In Brisbane there’s a massive pool of kids. But here people are having to travel to races, which means parents have to be more invested.
“But we’ve got the weather and humidity. People want to train in it, so that’s on our side.
“When it comes to facilities, there’s always talk that there’s going to be more, but we make do with what we have.”
This week Cairns councillors voted in favour of a proposal to transform Barlow Park into a high-performance hub with regular training opportunities, sports tourism, education and commercial activity, partnering with stakeholders such as TAFE and CQUniversity. But that could mean the end of a dream of building a 20,000-seat rectangular stadium in time to host Olympic football matches in 2032.
Nikki Huddy, a town planning lecturer at JCU, said the regions’ needs must not be excluded from that conversation.
“The Olympic motto has always been faster, high, stronger; they’ve added another one: together,” she said.
“There’s a real emphasis ... to make sure (the Games) leaves a positive legacy across the whole community.
“Even the little towns in our region, places like Gordonvale and Innisfail, there’s opportunity to improve their sporting facilities.”
Ms Huddy said the Far North needs to duplicate its current amount of leisure facilities in the next 15 years to match a possible doubling of population, and the sporting talent that will naturally follow.
“We’re going to need a quality rectangular stadium, probably in the southern corridor where most of our young families are,” she said.
“As you build up to the Olympics ... there’s a huge enthusiasm by communities to be healthy. That’s one thing that was noticed after the Sydney Olympics – the whole nation was ready to get fit, but we didn’t have the infrastructure to help people do that.
“To capitalise on that attitude, we need things like bike paths and jogging trails. Cairns might have great basketball and netball facilities, for example, but do the regions have that as well?
“This is an opportunity for all our communities to get together and say ‘what do we want as our legacy’, and to ask for it consistently until we get it.”
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Originally published as Future Cairns: What are the chances of a Cairns athlete at the Brisbane 2032 Olympics?
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