Up for the Cup

Playing host to the Ryder Cup in 2010 is just the latest in a long line of achievements by Wales’ third city, Newport’s managing director Chris Freegard tells Chris Jones

The Ryder Cup, the world’s premier golfing tournament which every two years pitches a team from the US against Europe’s leading golfers, will come to Wales for the first time in 2010.

This, says Chris Freegard, managing director of host city Newport, is “important for Wales as a whole and for us as a city”. In particular, he says, it will help boost Wales as a golf tourism destination. “There will be a major legacy from the championship in terms of boosting Welsh golf courses – all of which are small or medium-sized enterprises. They are investing in improvements and attracting new golfers to the sport – women, young people – and bringing more jobs. The Celtic Manor, which will host the Ryder Cup, has invested in a completely new course, and has upgraded its hotel facilities as well, which will be of benefit to the region long after the championship is over.” Newport and the region “are using the Ryder Cup to raise their profile, but this will not just be a benefit in tourism terms, it should also be good for growing businesses”.

Freegard says that the city has also set itself 2010 as the date by which it hopes to have completed the regeneration of the city and its surrounding region, just in time for the first golf fanatics to arrive for the Cup. Situated on the M4, M5 and M50 motorways, Newport is extremely well positioned, Freegard claims, with Cardiff and Bristol on its doorstep and London less than two hours away. “We have two regional airports and seven universities within an hour of the city,” he says. The population of Newport is growing steadily – there are 140,000 people there now and 15,000 expected by 2011. To cope with the population increase, the city has developed brownfield sites on both sides of the River Usk to create 4000 homes at a cost of £2bn. “There have road and rail upgrades, two new shopping schemes, a new rugby stadium for the regional Newport Gwent Dragons team, and we’ve had a great deal of media interest since we got the Cup – we have a very good story to tell about our regeneration.”

The city shows no sign of slowing down, either. “We are the major employer in the Eastern Valleys – there are 10,000 jobs in the region, 40 per cent of them outside the city. We have a large number of public sector workers here – the national statistics office, the patent office, the home office, work and pensions, passports – they all have offices here. And a recent Experian report showed that we had growth potential that was bigger than that of Cardiff, the capital, so we plan to keep growing.” But the city’s development is also sustainable. “We were voted one of the ‘greenest’ cities in the UK by the WWF,” boasts Freegard. But he adds that it is important that Newport’s success reaches out to the whole of southeast Wales as well. “The type of people that are likely to be attracted by the Cup – fairly well off golf tourists – should give a boost to the entire regional economy.”

And the decision by the Welsh Assembly to highlight the Ryder Cup at the Committee of the Regions was welcomed by Freegard. “The Ryder Cup is one of the very few sporting events where there is a European team – how many others can you think of that do? The TV interest in an event like this is enormous, so it’s worth flagging it up wherever we can.”

“We’ve had an enormous commitment from the local council,” Freegard adds. “We are not just doing this for the three days of the Cup – this is a long-term project, with goals that have been set and aims that will be reached. It is about image and perception of Newport and south Wales above all.” But, he concedes, it is hard to make a direct link between a sporting event and future investments. “We can’t say that companies will come and invest in Newport because they have seen it on the TV or visited it during the Cup. But we hope at least that it might accelerate the rate of investment in the region a little bit.”