Summer Sports - Bowls
Expectations are running high that the 2014 Commonwealth Games will mark the rebirth of lawn bowls in Scotland. All the signs are favourable that it will, reports Tom James
READY to take on the WORLD
Artists impression of the Commonwealth 2014 event
he five-year build-up to London 2012 has ensured that the Olympic Park, and the venues within it, are ready and waiting for the Games to commence. Not so surprising, then, to be looking ahead to 2014 and another spectacle of elite sport - the Commonwealth Games. Even as we anticipate the afterglow of
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Team GB’s medal success, planning for the second biggest athletics event in the world has already sprung out of the starting blocks, as Glasgow prepares for the show to hit town, some twenty-six years after Scotland last played host in 1986.
The Olympics may be the career high for elite competitors but, for those involved in fine turf sports, the Commonwealth Games offers a showcase for a clutch of pursuits that Britain often excels at, away from track and field. Bowls is one such sport. Often
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dominated by the British nations, it is in crisis at grassroots level. Falling member numbers, a generation of youth disinterested in its seemingly low adrenalin profile, and dearth of investment, all contribute to what the game’s administrators admit is a deeply worrying state of affairs.
Glasgow offers the perfect opportunity for bowls to assume centre stage before a global audience, and the game’s governing body will be well into its five- year strategy for transforming the fortunes of a sport that Scotland expects its national players to deliver when it matters.
Still more than two years away from the big event, nothing less than a total reconstruction of the focus for the bowling competition is already complete and prepared for practice play. The setting is stunning. Kelvingrove and its six lawn bowls greens lie in the
lee of some of Glasgow’s grandest and most beautiful buildings. This is no ultra chic architectural statement for 21st century sporting provision, but an example of sustainability many perhaps intended, in that the planners have preserved the very best of what was there - and improved on it for the modern game.
It’s a strategy that looks set for success. Glasgow City Council’s decision to redevelop the existing Kelvingrove Lawn Bowls Centre, and invest in making it truly world class, has already drawn praise from World Bowls, the sport’s governing body, when they visited the centre last autumn.
The development comes at a time when Bowls Scotland is setting out new long-term goals to move the sport on and to help bolster member numbers nationally. The opportunity to stage the Commonwealth Games offers the newly
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