Downtown lacking sports facilities

• Source: Global Times
• [08:24 August 09 2010]
• Comments

Cheerleaders from East China Normal University perform at the Bund yesterday to celebrate National Fitness Day. Photo: Xinhua

By Liu Dong

The city is falling short of fulfilling its vow to create more opportunities for downtown residents to keep physically fit with previously promised public exercise facilities yet to be constructed in urban areas as of Sunday, when the country marked its 2nd annual National Fitness Day.

Amid heart-pumping activities organized Sunday for residents around the city, the Shanghai Sports Administration said that it has made headway on the 40 new public sports facilities to be completed by the end of the year.

But with only a quarter of these places currently available in downtown areas and no plans to build additional ones in urban areas, the city is failing to meet the original goal of offering twice that number to city slickers.

The government last year said that it would work this year to honor a framework to provide 50 percent of the city's public sports facilities to residents downtown, where finding a place to exercise is tough due to a lack of open spaces.

Yet a current city blueprint of these places reveals that downtown spots only make up some 40 percent of the some 260 of such spaces - with the remaining majority situated in outlying areas.

Spacing issues

But Li Weiting, deputy director of Shanghai Sports Administration, defended slow progress in this arena Sunday, saying that limited land resources in densely populated urban sprawls remains the biggest challenge to creating new public sports facilities in downtown locations.

"We're talking with different government departments, asking them to clear some of their lands designated for other projects for us," he told local media.

But according to the Shanghai Sports Administration, setbacks downtown have been offset by strides made in the suburbs, where nearly 30 additional public sports facilities, each occupying a space of roughly 1,500 square meters, are well ahead of schedule, some of which are already being used by local residents.

Apart from these facilities, which generally include indoor and outdoor areas for badminton, basketball, tennis and croquet, other athletic spaces around the city comprise some 600 outdoor field areas and more than 7,500 community facilities, which are equipped with low-impact exercise machines geared towards the health interests of seniors.

According to Wang Yue, director of the School of Sports Science and Engineering from East China University of Science and Technology, the city desperately needs more public sports facilities in order to adequately serve a public of more than 20 million residents.

"New facilities are really needed as the bulk of those in existence are mostly only suitable for old people," he told the Global Times Sunday. "Young people need places that offer the means for more rigid cardiovascular exercise."

Fallout factors

Meanwhile, Wang Renwei, a professor from Shanghai University of Sport, said Sunday that a lack of available facilities for youth in the city is contributing to growing health problems among them, more than 11 percent of whom were con-sidered obese at the end of last year. She further pointed to a recent study that found Shanghai youth now fall below Japanese youngsters when it comes to physical fitness.

"We're really worried about that," she told the Global Times.

"Part of the problem is that youth have few options when it comes to exercising in the city," she added. "The situation is worsened in the summer when schools are closed and students can't make use of their gyms."

Wang said that parents also need to teach their child that physical well-being is just as important as academic achievement, particularly as an increasing number of kids fall victim to inactive lifestyles and diets with fast-food increasingly serving as meals for students in between study breaks.