ATHLETICS - Artificial running track on target for summer start

Ian Babe remembers sitting in an athletics meeting in 1966 that decided to start fundraising to build an artificial track. Little did he realise that it would take another 40 years before the dream would come to fruition.
But the waiting seems only to have made the success all the more enticing.
An $800,000 gift from the Whangarei District Council will see a new artificial athletics track laid at Kensington Park this summer. So Babe is going to see the athletics dream come true.
"This is going to be hugely exciting for the whole community and set up the Kensington area as a real honeypot for sport," said Babe, who is now operating as chairman of Athletics Whangarei and president of Athletics Northland while also being a high performance coach.
"It is the most exciting development for athletics and for sport in general in Northland in, well, nearly 50 years. I can recall being involved in a committee way back in the 1960s and there have been at least three different groups since then all trying to get this track to happen. We started fundraising in the 1960s and that money has just been sitting there waiting for this to happen," he said.
The new eight-lane track will be positioned in the south-east corner of Kensington Park and is part of a two-stage plan that will eventually add a gymnastics hall, followed shortly after by offices and administration facilities to house the regional sports trust, Sport Northland.
But the success has only come about after the WDC decided to fully fund stage one of the project, the new track, instead of splitting community funding between the first and second stages.
Just two months ago plans to develop the track at Kensington Park appeared to have been stymied when a $750,000 funding application to the ASB Trust was declined. But it didn't take long for the WDC to react, and decide to back the project anyway. The funding decision will make sure the project finally proceeds, even if the other facilities are put on the backburner as a result.
Now Babe is hoping to fast-track the process and get the track built this summer.
"We are notifying the guys to put the track down. We need to get back to them and get a price for the track, but really everything is ready to go now," he said.
"As I understand it they will be able to start work probably in September.
"From a coach's point of view this is just magic. Just thinking about the string of athletes that have come out of Northland in the last 10 to 15 years, a few of them being national class sprinters, and all from here where we had no fast track to train on. We have achieved so much all without it - imagine what we might achieve with it."
It has been more than 15 years since a scoria track at Okara Park was used for athletics meets, some of them attracting international running stars. But that track was lifted when the rugby playing surface at the ground was upgraded. Since then athletes have trained on grass at Kensington Park, which has left the sport floundering. The new track, Babe says, may even see national athletics events return to the north.