Cover Story
In Sport...Fiji Banks On Best And Biggest SPG
5000 athletes to flock to Suva for the games
This year is the year of the 11th South Pacific Games. The place and dates: Suva, Fiji, June 28-July 12. At that time Suva will surely be the place in the Pacific Islands to be.
The Fiji capital will be buzzing with not just sport but also numerous other associated events and the presence in it of thousands of visitors from all 22 countries of the Pacific Islands region.
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The Fiji organising committee is determined to ensure its F$17-million (US$7.82 million) budget will produce the biggest, most spectacular and best South Pacific Games there’s ever been. And also a safe games. The committee is deeply conscious that in these times no place on Earth, no matter how innocent and how far from the world’s serious trouble spots, is immune from the attention of terror.
There’s another motive behind the committee’s effort, one backed heartily by the Fiji Government.
This is that the assembly in the Fiji capital of more than 5000 athletes and officials will be a watershed, a launching pad for the relaunching of Fiji as the political, business, education, transport and services hub of the Pacific.
By the time of the games in the middle of the year, Fiji Islanders hope, the country will at last be moving away from 15 years of floundered hopes, disillusion and unease caused by three coups and the ruin and losses caused by them.
There’s just one problem for would-be visiting spectators. Accommodation. Suva, not being much of a tourist town, is not all that well off for accommodation and what there is available tends to be taken by business and regional institution travellers.
The games committee is hard put to find beds for athletes and officials, let alone spectators. By the end of October, entries received from 18 of the expected 22 competing countries indicated that the organising committee would need to cater for more than 4700 athletes, that’s nearly half the number present at the Sydney Olympics, and 600 officials.
About 2500 of those numbers will be put up on campus at the University of the South Pacific (USP), which is the immediate neighbour of the main games venues. USP has presented a F$4 million (US$1.84 million) bill for being prepared to render that service.
Then called Buckhurst Park, Fiji’s National Stadium, was where the first South Pacific Games were held in 1963 on what was then a somewhat rough and basic field where about 1000 athletes gathered.
There have been a few changes since; a big indoor sports hall and other facilities are shaping up across the road while the main ground has been given a facelift and some of its facilities improved or expanded.
In December, Dr Jacques Rogge, of Belgium, elected earlier this year as the new chairperson of the International Olympic Committee, was in Suva for a meeting with Oceania’s 14 national Olympic committees.
He spoke warmly of what he’d discovered in the Pacific, a region, he said, where sport was clearly of enormous importance.
“In Oceania, sports and the Olympic movement is in good shape. There are definitely difficulties in terms of travelling; communications are not always easy,” he said at a media conference.
“There is a great spirit of co-operation between all (14 committees) and great professional expertise in each of them.
“Sport is important to this region. There is great co-operation between different countries; they are willing to help each other, which is really unique.”
The International Olympic Committee has a US$209 million sports development fund to be distributed during the four years between the Sydney and Athens Games.
Rogge said since the International Olympic Committee had a policy of chanelling most of the money to developing nations, the Pacific Islands would receive 17 to 18 percent of the total—US$3 million a year.
Rogge supported a suggestion for the opening of a regional centre for the training of athletes, as had been done in other regions.
“It is a way of minimising costs,” he said. “It is something that has to be decided by the region itself. We (the IOC) have a very decentralised policy; we provide funds and expertise where needed.”
Rogge said after the next Olympic Games in Athletes, the IOC would decide whether to include rugby union and golf in the list of 28 sports the Games were restricted to.
But if rugby and golf were to be admitted, some other sports would have to be cut from the list. Those on the elimination list were baseball, softball and modern pentathlon.
