Advertiser launches its Fighting Fit campaign

It’s fine to pump money into creating the gold medallists of the future, but what about the rest of us? 

As the Government slashes council budgets, forcing cuts across all sectors, we need to battle to ensure Rotherham gets its fair share of the money needed to provide the facilities that can help people in the town increase their exercise levels, improve their diets and gain knowledge of what makes for a healthy lifestyle.

That's why we are launching our Fighting Fit campaign.

The battle includes a fight to save the ground-breaking Rotherham Institute for Obesity (RIO), which saves lives across the town but faces closure if funding is cut.

We have already lost Herringthorpe Leisure Centre, countless football pitches, several sports halls, swimming pools, hockey and bowls facilities — and we are told there are more cuts to come. Rotherham needs to fight back to get fighting fit for the future — and we need your help in making sure this happens.

It would be far too easy for us to sit behind our keyboards and ask for better facilities, but we are not going to do that. 

We aren’t going to simply criticise the council and others for closing down sports and health facilities.

We are going to ask those with influence to press the powers that be for money to provide such as sports centres, football pitches, coaches for athletics clubs and bowling greens at grassroots level, and to make sure that what we still have is not allowed to close.

We are going to fight for funding to ensure that the trail-blazing and life-changing RIO is not allowed to fold, we are going to publicise events taking place across the borough and take part in them ourselves.

We can’t all be world beaters, but we should at least have the opportunity to try out the same sports as those who are.

The basic aims of our Fighting Fit campaign are to increase exercise levels through better sporting facilities across the Rotherham borough; to improve health and wellbeing through increased participation in sport and exercise; to achieve funding for better sporting facilities in Rotherham and to save RIO. 

We would also impress upon the Government and the council that this latter aim should not be achieved at the expense of the closure of or reduction of other life-changing/saving facilities.

Why are we doing this? Well, the statistics are worrying — 21.6 per cent of Year 6 pupils and 28.5pc of adults were obese in Rotherham in 2014/15, with just 27.2pc of people aged 16 and over taking part in sport at least once a week.

The latter figure is the lowest in ten years — and down more than a quarter in four years.

But encouragingly, more than half of adults want to take part in more sport and exercise.

If we don’t do something to improve the other figures, our future generations will suffer and the people of Rotherham will literally be unfit for purpose.

                                                  Lord Coe

Chairman of the British Olympic Committee Lord Coe may have held out his hands in mock amazement as he noted the number of Olympic medallists and said: “Legacy, what legacy?”

And last week Lord Coe visited the Olympic Legacy Park just two miles down the road in Sheffield and said: “The best definition of legacy for me is what it is that you leave behind after youve had a great event.”

Little has been left behind for Rotherham itself following London 2012 and Rio 2016.

And if action is not taken soon, Rotherham will simply be left behind.

For more on our Fighting Fit campaign see this week's Advertiser.