SPORTS PARKS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 July 1938, Page 6

SPORTS PARKS

DEVELOPMENT IN FRANCE. At a time when newspapers are filled with tirades of dictators and One half of Europe is being solemnly bluffed by the other, little of the real progress of countries gets into the news. Great changes are taking place unnoticed. Not the least of these are in the domain of sports. Provincial towns in France are building sports parks, “pares des sports,” and the English traveller, still inclined to think of France in terms of the music hall Frenchman with impossible pointed top-hat,- pointed moustache and ■ goatee, is surprised to find a country where athletics have taken such an important place. It is not that more Frenchmen, copying England, play football or go swimming, but municipalities have become sportsminded to an extraordinary degree. It comes as something of a surprise to find at the Porte d’Auteuil, one of the western gates of Paris, no fewer than six separate sports grounds touching • one another, sports grounds complete with running tracks, tennis courts, association and Rugby football fields. How many capitals could match this? The “sports parks” are laid out by municipalities, and if France has been a little late in taking up sports she is taking them up’thoroughly. Bordeaux has its sports park, and Toulouse has its sports park, to mention only two towns out of many. They are almost like sports parks of a Wells utopian community. The sports park of Toulouse has no fewer than four swimming pools. Three are in the .open air. The largest is 164 yards long by 55 yards wide, and the bottom slopes down gradually from the sides to the middle. At one end of this pool, separated from it by rockery, is a children’s pool, in which the water is about two feet deep, where the little ones can splash about in safety. At the other end there is a complete Olympic swimming pool, with mosaic and tiled bottom, with diving' tower, and seats around for spectators. The fourth bath is under cover, the winter bath, with warmed water, 37 yards long, by 13 wide, continued by a learners’ section, 17 yards by 13 yards. The cabins are a picture of what cabins should be. Every one of the two hundred has walls with white tiles and is fitted with a shower bath. Seven hundred children every morning take their swimming lesson here. When all the pools are in use it is claimed that 3.000 swimmers can bathe at a time. The other part of the Toulouse sports park, when completed next year will have two football fields, twenty tennis courts, an athletic field, cinder track and concrete motor cycle track, with covered seats for 30,000 spectators.