Cycling and walking - sports or not?

The Observer yesterday reported that recreational cycling and walking are to be removed from the official definition of what counts as  a sport, meaning they are likely to lose some funding sources.

Here’s some quotes from the article “On Wednesday, the government will announce a cross-government review of sport and physical activity that will spend four months looking at ways of tackling obesity by making people more active.  ….. Under [the Culture Secretary's] plans, a number of grassroots projects that currently attract funding will no longer be classified as sports. These include recreational cycling, walking, going to the gym, dancing and yoga.” And encouraging participation for fitness would be pushed to the NHS and health budgets.

Personally I’ve never seen my cycling as a sport, and the NHS is already doing some healthy activity promotion , but this doesn’t sound like a  good move.

Cycling is eco and healthy

Health secretary Alan Johnson’s idea of broadening the proposed 10 eco towns into healthy or fit towns makes sense. I’d hope that planning for walking and cycling would have been important parts of such towns anyway.

I’d also hope that we don’t have to wait for these towns to be built before the rest of the country to take the link seriously.

See The Guardian’s article on fit towns.

And Cycling Edinburgh blog has an item addressing safety concerns which is worth a read - Cycling IS safe.