COMMUNITY leaders in the county are starting a drive to bring Olympic benefits to Buckinghamshire.
A conference at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College in High Wycombe on Thursday is intended to fire people up in the run up to London 2012. The college has 2,00 students in its faculty of sport and leisure.
And at County Hall, Buckinghamshire County Council is looking to what the 16 days of sport can bring long term to the county.
High Wycombe's planned new swimming pool not yet built and not even with a definite site agreed is seen as an ideal place for Olympic swimmers to train.
The Olympic rowing will be held in the county, at Dorney Lake.
There is a vision for an Academy of Sport at county council owned Green Park at Aston Clinton to be used for training, as would Stoke Mandeville, the home of disabled sport.
Southern Bucks has good road and rail links to London and with improvements, including park and ride sites, possibly at Handy Cross, athletes, their families and sports fans could get quickly to the capital.
People would be attracted to stay in the county while the Games are on, to sample its towns and countryside and to come back.
The county council's vision is being pushed by chief executive Chris Williams, who has set up a team led by strategic planner Neil Gibson. Olympic 100 metres breast stroke gold medallist Adrian Moorhouse, a Bucks businessmen, is on board.
"Adrian is working with us to help us understand how to capitalise on the Olympics in terms of tourism, business and, most important, the nations who will compete here," he said One idea was to identify one of the minor nations taking part and encourage it to make Bucks its training HQ, he said.
This could be a country from the Indian sub-continent or the Caribbean, which had close family links with Bucks.
Wycombe district councillor Mike Appleyard, who chairs the council's Gateway Project, which is looking at a new sports centre and pool to replace that at Handy Cross, said he very much hoped the new pool would be a 50 metre one suitable for Olympic training.
If it was to be built it would need to be in place by 2008/9.
Mr Williams said now was the time for businesses to start thinking ahead.
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