'Huge Progress' for Sheffield's Olympic Legacy Park
The team behind plans for an Olympic Legacy Park on the site where Don Valley stadium used to be, say they've made 'huge progress'.
The re-development of the site where Don Valley used to be has reached another milestone.
You can watch a video report here:
The multi-million pound project will create an Olympic Legacy Park.
It will bring together new sporting facilities for elite and professional athletes as well as the local community.
There will also be the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre where experts will be looking at ways of helping people to be more active.
Work should start on an arena and 3G pitch over the next twelve months with the AWRC due to open in late 2017.
The school, Oasis Academy Don Valley has just taken in its first cohort of pupils.
The Government's giving ÂŁ14 million in funding for the AWRC.
The Minister for Public Health, Jane Ellison, has been to visit the site and the new school.
She said:
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"Where you bring bright people with great ideas together, good things come from that. You can see there's this huge potential for a centre of excellence growing up here and I'm sure it will.
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"One of the exciting things is that the children here are actually going to be part of some of the research in the years going forward. So it's a lovely opportunity for them and I'm sure that we're going to find that lessons we learn from the children in Sheffield are going to be learned right across the nation."
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Around a third of people in Sheffield do less than half an hour of exercise each week so one of the key aims is to get people moving more.
Professor Steve Haake, the director of the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre, said:
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"There's a statistic that I have seen that shows if you do fifteen minutes of moderate exercise per day you can reduce your risk of death, not just disease, but death, by 10%. If you can reduce your risk of death by 10% why would you not do at least fifteen minutes of moderate exercise a day?!
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"People in Sheffield might see some Apps starting to appear. They might see some technology staritng to appear and they might see some students starting some research projects around the city, because we were really want to embed these technologies right across the population. So it's not in a laboratory. We might start them here, we might design them here, but they'll be out there in the big wide world."
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Former sports minister and Sheffield MP Richard Caborn's the chairman of the Olympic Legacy Park.
He's told us it's about more than just the economic benefits:
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"We are now looking at how we can use this as a big economic driver in many ways to develop around this area. This big strip with the Supertram on one side and Attercliffe road on the other, the arena at the bottom, Woodburn road at the top. This will be the Wellness Park and we will see a lot of inward investment and activity here."
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Today the second private sector partner for the AWRC was announces as Westfield Health.
The first was Toshiba which signed a ÂŁ1.5million deal in May.