A major investment conference and celebratory dinner featuring a line-up of sporting superstars will be taking place in Sheffield this year to mark the 10th anniversary of London 2012.
The events will showcase the transformational economic, health, sporting and environmental legacies being driven and delivered by Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park.
The Park was set up after the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games to deliver whole population improvements in health and wellbeing. It is the only Legacy Park outside an Olympic host city anywhere in the world and has already created a unique site attracting over £100m of private and public investment over the last seven years.
Bringing together expertise from academia, elite sport, the NHS, and public and private sector organisations, the Park is creating a unique cluster of life sciences assets including research centres, business incubators, educational facilities and laboratories for collaborative research and innovation in health and wellbeing.
Legacy Park Ltd Chair and former Sports Minister Richard Caborn, who was a key figure in bringing the Games to London in 2012, said: “If Sheffield had been a country in 2012 it would have come 14th in the medal table through the athletes we developed and trained in the English Institute of Sport Sheffield and we have not stopped there.
“We are building and developing in the North of England one of the country’s foremost Life Sciences Parks and with the backing of the city’s anchor institutions delivering, like no other, the Olympic Legacy the country promised.”
A ‘Levelling Up in Action’ conference at Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park in the Autumn will focus on how mixed-use innovation sites across the country are helping to develop the ‘six capitals’ of the Levelling Up White Paper agenda. It is expected to attract leading regional, national and international economic, political and business figures.
An ‘Olympic Legacy in Action’ gala dinner will take place at the English Institute of Sport Sheffield (EISS) on September 9 with guests including a host of well-known sporting names from the last decade. The event will celebrate Sheffield’s contribution to the Olympics and Paralympics, and the sporting legacy of the 2012 Games being created in the city.
Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park will also host a three-day ‘Olympic Legacy in Action’ community weekend from June 17-19 with city-wide and local service delivery partners providing a variety of free sport, health and wellbeing taster sessions.
The weekend is being organised with Yorkshire Sport Foundation and Sheffield City Trust and will form part of Sheffield’s annual ‘Move More Month’.
Richard said: “We have brought sports science and medicine, sports psychology and engineering together to create a unique legacy unrivalled anywhere in the world and I don’t think it could have happened anywhere else but Sheffield.
“From the start we brought together a partnership of public and private sector organisations with a clear vision of what we wanted to achieve – an agenda of change which we are delivering day after day, and which puts health at the heart of both economic growth and social mobility.”
