School to play role at Olympics

12 March 2010

A Catholic school in Derbyshire that the Jesuits founded in 1842 is lending its sports facilities to national sports teams who plan to visit ahead of the Olympics and Paralympics in 2012.

Mount St Mary’s College, based at Spinkhill, features in the London organising committee pre-Games training camp guide, which is designed to give teams and individual athletes a great selection of venues from which they can choose to prepare for the Games.

The college has first-hand experience of hosting scores of international events and elite sport training camps including the British orienteering squad training camp, the annual academy for Great Britain rugby football league and the British athletics endurance squad training camp.

It is also the home base for the German exiles rugby league team, the Scottish exiles rugby academy and the north east Derbyshire Chargers rugby team.

Mount St Mary’s is a day and boarding school and it has a grade one athletics centre with an all-weather, six-lane, floodlit track and separate floodlit throws and jumps area, changing rooms, a physiotherapy and medical room and conference facilities.

Paul Scott, director of sport at the school, said: “Mount St Mary’s has a proud sporting heritage and, following considerable investment, we have become a venue of excellence with exceptional athletics facilities and accommodation.

The opportunity to train and live in one location makes Mount St Mary’s College very attractive to a variety of elite Olympic sports, particularly track and field athletics, and the popularity of the venue as a base for training camps is increasing every year.”

The catering department at Mount St Mary’s has been advised by Jane Griffin, a former British Olympic Association and current rugby league nutritionist. The department strives to ensure that the meals provided to the athletes contain the correct nutritional value.

Miss Griffin said: “Having personally experienced the meals at Mount St Mary’s College for a week on separate occasions, the food is of a good quality prepared and cooked to a high standard. Choices and quantities at meal-times have been more than adequate for our elite young rugby players.”