As we approach one month to go until the start of the UCI Road World Championships in Wollongong, it is at the same time exciting and daunting to see more than two years of detailed planning coming to life.
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With its more imminent approach, there are naturally many questions and concerns from the community, as the prospect of the event becomes increasingly top-of-mind.
The team at Wollongong 2022 and I have been doing our best to address these, through literally hundreds of meetings with stakeholders, community and business representatives, newsletters and letterbox drops, letters to all households in the LGA, information stalls and advertising and stories in the Mercury. And that will continue and ramp up further in the weeks ahead. We are working with the Mercury to publish the answers to several dozen common questions that have been raised by readers.
There are always impacts on communities when cities host events of this size. The UCI Road World Championships are no exception, and we are extraordinarily grateful for the sacrifices that some members of our community are making to ensure that the event can be a great and lasting success for our city. We certainly hope that, like Sydney in 2000 or more recently Birmingham for their successful Commonwealth Games, once the event gets underway, the once-in-a-generation opportunity to experience it in your home town can come to the fore.
Our mission over the month remaining before we welcome the world to Wollongong therefore, is to assist the whole community to plan and prepare as well as possible, so that our experience can be as positive and memorable as it was in Sydney in 2000 or Birmingham last month. We will be redoubling our efforts to provide all the information you need to minimise any negative impacts, and join a celebration of Wollongong's success.
And once the party is over, and we have shared and showcased Wollongong with hundreds of thousands of spectators, and hundreds of millions of international viewers, the rewards, in terms of Wollongong's future tourism, hospitality and inward investment opportunities will flow.
We certainly appreciate that, for some members of our community, those rewards will be hard won, and that the inconvenience may be significant. And we would like to take the opportunity to thank you in advance for playing your part in making Wollongong's largest ever event one that all of Wollongong will be proud of for a very long time.
- Stuart Taggart is CEO of Wollongong 2022