Band 6+: Some countries achieve international success by building specialized facilities to train top athletes instead of providing sports facilities that everyone can use. Is it a positive or negative development?

It is true that, nowadays, various nations prefer to spend their budgets on constructing specialized amenities for professional athletes in order to win a greater international competition, rather than facilitate public sport facilities. This essay attempts to shed light on both merits and demerits of this tendency before concluding that this is an indeed disencouraging development.

On the one hand it is essential to acknowledge the profound benefit of concentrating on providing the sport facilities for those top athletes. One key rationale in favor of this view is that the athletes would be able to prepare for the best performance before important competition. This is because by practicing in the most modern training environment, and high quality equipment, these sport players could be able to stand a better chance of gaining success internationally. This can be seen in the case of China, where the government invested significant expenses for the sports section, specifically almost 80% of sport amenities were just served for national athletes. As a result, this country was the second highest gold medalist in most of the Olympic seasons.

Notwithstanding the aforementioned drawbacks, I am convinced that over invested sports facilities for professional athletes could be fraught with some pitfalls due to the following reasons. First and foremost, this would likely lead to detrimental protest within the society, as a whole. This could be further clarified by the fact that there is a high demand for practicing sport among the residents, especially for the younger generation, thus if the public sport amenities are not well equipped, there would trigger the deterioration in the relationship between the resident and their national authorities. Moreover, the enormous cost incurred to build such specialized facilities would put a strain on government coffers. As a result, this could lead to budget deficits, tax hikes, or reduced social welfare, thereby forcing ordinary citizens, especially the underprivileged, to struggle even more to earn a living.

In conclusion, while it is irrefutable that providing professional amenities to the athlete could bring a number of significant advantages, I would contend that the downside of this phenomenon is far more noteworthy than its upside.