The sports Super Centre. Where Education Meets Sport

In the late 1990’s Ron Clarke, the former Olympian and Gold Coast Mayor teamed up with American philanthropist Chuck Feeney to build a world class athletics training centre at Runaway Bay.

With the Sydney Olympics on the horizon they saw an opportunity to not only help athletes, but to create a much needed facility on the Gold Coast. In 2007 the Sports Super Centre was purchased by the Queensland State Government through the Department of Education and Training.

Today the facility offers a range of diverse training and development opportunities for the local community, school kids and international visitors, as well as disabled and professional athletes.

Brendan Flynn is the Director of the Centre. Flynn’s background is very much from a sports development and management perspective having coached and managed Olympic athletes from the Australian Institute of Sport and later the Australian Paralympic Committee.

Under Brendan Flynn’s leadership there’s been a significant refurbishment of the Centre with several million dollars invested in a new athletics track, hockey field and soon the gymnasium, which currently serves over two thousand local members.

The Sports Super Centre also provides accommodation for up to 300 guests, has a commercial dining room and a sports medicine centre that runs exercise programs for people with MS and Parkinson’s Disease.

The real strength in what the facility offers is the diversity provided through its educational and development opportunities.

Twelve thousand school kids participate in leadership programs both inside and outside of the classroom each year.

As Flynn says: “At a time when kids are spending an increasing amount of time on screens and less in the physical environment our programs are vital for their development.”

Flynn says they’re always thinking outside the square looking for new opportunities.

“We run many programs for students and athletes from Asian countries. For instance, we’re doing a lot of work in China where we bring out Chinese school students to undertake a combined sporting and English language program.

We have 100 students here this week on that course.”

“We’ve also been working with Griffith University and City of Gold Coast to bring Oceania athletes here who’ve never seen a running track in their life.

We want to create personal development opportunities for people from all walks of life.”

For now, the focus is on the Commonwealth Games with the centre hosting official training events for hockey, beach volleyball, triathlon and para-triahtlon athletes for competing teams.

Athletes from India, Ghana, Nigeria and Northern Ireland will stay and train at the Sports Super Centre until the athlete’s village opens on the 25th March, when it will become the official training facility for the Australian athletics team during the Games.

And what does the future hold for the Centre after the Games? “The Queensland Academy of Sport has just signed on to base their high performance unit here, while the World Parachute Championships are also being held here in October with 10 000 visitors from 160 countries taking part.

We’re also talking to a number of European countries about basing their teams here in the lead up to the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics in Japan.

There’s only an hour’s time difference and the climate is very similar, so it’s an ideal facility for acclimatisation.”

As a veteran of many Olympic and Commonwealth Games campaigns I can’t let Brendan Flynn go without asking him how we should measure our success as the host city of GC2018?

“As an athlete the things that are most important to you are where you live, where you train, where you eat, where you compete and crucially – how long it takes you to get to those facilities.

If it takes an athlete or a team 2 hours to get somewhere when it should only take 20 minutes, then it’s going to reflect badly on us.

But if we get that right, it will be a success and that’s important because those athletes will become our champions when they return to their home countries.”