Main stand at National Sports Centre stadium needs to be demolished
ATHENS. Structural adequacy study shows that it is not safe.
The officials from the General Sports Secretariat were disarmingly honest with us. However, this is not good news for the issue of sports facilities in Corfu.
We met with the General Secretary of Sports at his office in Athens last Wednesday (22/3). Giorgos Mavrotas is a living legend of Greek water polo, he was the captain of the national team, and participated in five Olympics. He remembers that he won his first title in the Greek water polo championship with Vouliagmeni (NOV) against Olympiakos in Corfu, at the EAKK swimming pool, in 1991.
And so, the journalists from Enimerosi (Katsaitis and Pantazopoulos) were given the opportunity to start the conversation about the situation of the swimming pool and Corfu National Sports Centre in general. The director of Technical Services, Dimitris Yiakas, who was called by the General Secretary for the briefing, repeatedly wondered why the people of Corfu are so upset about the issue of EAKK these days. "All the Sports Centres have similar, major problems," they both said.
Could it be that we objected because we are at the end of our rope?
From the outset, they made it clear to us that for any interventions in the National Sports Centre (EAΚ), as well as in Corfu, the decision lies with the Deputy Minister of Sports, L. Avgenakis.
It must be demolished
We started listing unfulfilled promises, operational and infrastructure problems both now and in the past. And we started with the structural issue.
The Director of Technical Services of the General Secretariat of Sports, revealed to us that the structural adequacy study of the main stand of the National Stadium has been completed and indicates that the stand is unsafe, cannot be fixed and should be demolished! But there is no money for this! At this point, they hastened to clarify that neither the roof nor the lighting poles have a problem and do not require any repairs.
Such expenses are not eligible for the ESPA funding programme, the General Secretariat of Sports says. The only source of funding could be EPA*.
However, the problem of understaffing in some locations is not only a problem for the individual sports facilities, but primarily the General Secretariat itself. "We used to have about 80 engineers and now we're down to 15," says the Director, revealing the basic and primary malaise of sports infrastructure in the country.
This necessarily leads to problems of function and functionality of sports facilities, whose solution literally depends on the good will of the few employees, as in Corfu, and the sports clubs. For these reasons, the closed Training Centre, on the south side of the National Sports Centre, has not yet been restored as a sports facility from its use as a Vaccination Centre and it remains unknown whether it is a construction site or a functioning sports area!
* The National Development Programme (EPA) was established by Law 4635/2019 (A'167) with the aim of adopting an integrated system for the design, management, monitoring, and control of interventions funded by the national resources of the Public Investment Programme (PDE).
GIORGOS KATSAITISVASSILIS PANTAZOPOULOS
