Golden dawn for tourism
2032 Olympic Games will attract holiday-makers to FNQ
STEVE Kerwitz always believed Barlow Park was capable of attracting big sporting events and carnivals.
So to have a bunch of Australian Olympic athletes training there, day-in, dayout in recent weeks, is “pretty special”, the supervisor of turf management at Barlow Park said.
“Mate it’s awesome. It is a good feeling,” he said.
Off the back of Brisbane’s successful 2032 Olympic bid, Mr Kerwitz said the council would love to have the athletes back up here training again.
“We’d love to have them back – it’s massive for council and massive for Cairns,” he said.
“Obviously I’m not an athlete anymore but coming up here and watching some of them run, there’s one lady … every time I’ve watched her, she’s run at the same pace for 25-30 minutes.
“She just goes. And I sit there and go ‘wow’.”
Riding high off Brisbane’s historic campaign, Advance Cairns executive chairman Nick Trompf and Cairns Mayor Bob Manning both said the win was exciting for Brisbane, Queensland – and especially Cairns.
Mr Trompf said leveraging the Olympics to boost Cairns’s tourism profile was an obvious opportunity.
“In many ways all roads and planes will lead to Brisbane, so it’s how we leverage off that which is the key thing, and the tourism guys will be working hard to do that – as
will tourist destinations right across the nation,” he said.
And having parts of the Australian Olympic team in Cairns training in preparation for Tokyo over the last few weeks put a spotlight on another potential opportunity, Mr Trompf said.
“Probably the biggest opportunity for us is pre-games training with all the countries that will come here to compete,” he said.
“There’s a big opportunity
for us and Townsville, in that space, to attract as many teams as they can to condition themselves for the climate – particularly those from the northern hemisphere.”
But Mr Trompf said there were also risks to hosting the Olympics in Brisbane, which could affect Cairns and other regional areas.
The cost of building roads and other infrastructure in south east Queensland would
put a “big strain” on the state government’s finances, he said, which could in turn lead to an infrastructure drought outside of the south east.
Cr Manning said he believed tourism was the key opportunity out of the 2032 Olympics.
He said the surge of internationals arriving in Australia as part of the Olympics would see them looking for tours both before and after the Games.