 
|
|||||||||
              
|
Pittsburgh in training for senior games UPMC leads early effort to host event in 2005 or 2007 Thursday, July 12, 2001 By Gary Rotstein, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Franklin Park's Martha McEvoy and other local athletes over 50 are preparing to travel nearly 1,000 miles to compete in the national senior olympics, but some local officials wish they could just stay home.
Allegheny County Chief Executive Jim Roddey and UPMC Center for Sports Medicine officials would like to see Pittsburgh host the Summer National Senior Games in 2005, drawing perhaps 10,000 aging athletes.
"To compete without having to pay for a motel and a flight, that would be fantastic. ... I would probably play softball and tennis and everything I qualified for," McEvoy said yesterday afternoon before dashing to the Sewickley Valley YMCA for a racquetball tune-up on her 56th birthday.
She's paying about $600 in airfare, lodging and other expenses to compete in racquetball and volleyball at the senior games in Baton Rouge, La., which will start Saturday and run through July 28. It would take too much of her time and money to compete in all the events for which she qualified last year by winning at the state level, so McEvoy's limiting her participation to a few events and days.
Officials with the UPMC Center for Sports Medicine, which is sending a team to Baton Rouge for research on senior athletes, are leading the effort to make Pittsburgh a host city. The center's director, Dr. Freddie Fu, has obtained the enthusiastic support of Roddey.
"He does plan to ask Dr. Fu to chair a public-private committee that would be made up of government and business and health and educational institutions, and he would expect that committee to put together the winning bid," said Roddey's spokeswoman, Margaret Philbin.
Representatives of the National Senior Games Association, which has organized a summer olympics every two years since 1987, say Pittsburgh will be among 40 cities invited this summer to submit a bid by November for the 2005 and 2007 games.
While the talks locally have only been preliminary, the idea could be all the more enticing because the metropolitan region has the highest percentage of elderly residents outside of Florida.
"We believe Pittsburgh and Allegheny County would be of great value as the venue site for a number of reasons. We've got a lot of seniors around, and we hope this would stimulate them to have a greater interest in being more active," said Dr. Peter Z. Cohen, an orthopedic surgeon who is director of the senior sports and fitness program run by UPMC's Division of Sports Medicine.
About 8,700 athletes 50 and older are expected to compete in Baton Rouge, down from 11,700 two years ago in Orlando, Fla., which was considered a bigger draw as a site. In all, a community can expect about 35,000 participants and guests in the course of the two-week event with a direct economic impact of $35 million, according to information that the national association is preparing to send to cities to begin the bidding process.
A decision on the 2005 and 2007 sites is not expected until mid-2002, said association spokesman Norm Reilly. He said six cities submitted bids in a process that began last year and resulted in Hampton Roads, Va., being chosen as the 2003 site.
While Baton Rouge and Hampton Roads, which is part of the Norfolk, Va., area, are not major cities, the event has also been held in places as large as St. Louis and San Antonio. Unlike the better-known Olympic Games, existing facilities are typically sufficient in any sizable city, but just like those bigger Games, a local organizing committee is expected to form and raise funds to help cover operating costs associated with the event.
Fu, who made headlines last year by suggesting that Pittsburgh should someday bid for the international Summer Olympics, said hosting the senior games could be a good first step toward attracting a bigger event, such as the Pan Am Games.
He and Cohen said athletic facilities at the South Side Works site and the Oakland campuses of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University would be suitable for most senior olympics games.
Nine Pittsburgh residents are among 355 Pennsylvanians 50 and older registered for the Baton Rouge games. They compete in track and field, swimming and others sports against their peers in five-year increments, starting at 50 to 54, then 55 to 59, and on up.
While many events are similar to the international Summer Olympics, the summer senior games also include competition in certain contests associated with older adults, such as shuffleboard and horseshoes.
This year's competitors will receive questionnaires from UPMC asking them to provide a detailed health history, which hasn't been done before on the athletes. Cohen is heading a research project that will analyze the data received from the athletes to see what can be learned from common experiences among the elite group, such as their ability to recover from injuries.
|
||||||||
