BMX track is forgotten by the directives

The school’s BMX track seems to have been left behind by the schools directives due to the poor conditions that it is in.  The track that once a role model for BMX tracks in Medellin know looks like a junkyard. Bike riding is one of the most popular sports in Colombia in the past years, according to Revista Dinero: “Of 2.2 billion pesos spent in the internet in the past years the most bought article was bicycles.” If bike riding is so popular in Colombia, then why did the school let the track come to this?

The Columbus School is one of the most expensive schools in Colombia making people think that lack of of money for this type of sports is not an issue here, so this makes it even harder to think of a reason of why does the track looks the way it does. In order to understand the issue better, I asked Freddie Badillo, that coordinates the sports department here at the school, and he told me the following: “The main reason for the bad state of the track is the weather: the constant rain made it impossible for the maintenance of it, and also for the lack of resources because we have few resources not just machinery but also human help, maintenance here have a lot of work, so just to take care of the BMX track would take 1 or 2 full time people to only take care of it,” Badillo said. It is true that such a large facility would require a lot of help, but if the school knew that it was falling apart, they should have acted earlier. “Usually maintenance  was done by the coach but so much rain ruined that, so the security was now an issue; when the students practiced there the risk of injury was higher,Badillo added.

If practicing BMX is not an option anymore, then the school must have come with a solution for it because there are many kids that have been affected by this because they don’t train anymore like Esteban Arango, a TCS junior, that used to train but couldn’t keep it up due to the condition of the track. “ I used to train some years ago but I couldn’t keep on because the track was so muddy and so ruined,” Arango said. When Badillo was asked about the solutions to this problem he answered “We looked at the cost and the track has to be re done, it takes 16 million pesos to just organized the track again, and then we looked at how many students were at the team, that were not many, so we decided to use the resources in gymnastics equipment, and organizing the soccer field, and we implemented mountain biking on the school, that is an activity that would help students during their whole life”

Even though the school seems to be carrying out this situation correctly, they should re organize the track since leaving it the way it disregarded state makes the campus look ugly. Not to mention perhaps the most important fact that having a BMX team at the school would open doors to many students since it is a very famous sport here in Colombia.