Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:48 pm on 13 September 2016.
Well, the Member seems to have a particularly delusional view of money, if I may say, because it is a significant financial commitment that it would have involved and it would have meant that we would not have been able to host many, many events in the future. It would have a knock-on effect on our capital budgets. It’s much better to look at investing in grass-roots sports, yes—in building up infrastructure, that much is true. We need, for example, to look at a velodrome with seats, which we don’t have. We need to look at the national pool—it doesn’t have seats. There’s a diving pool that needs to be improved in the future. But the costs he’s talking about are huge. From the perspective we have taken, we’ve looked at all the options for the Commonwealth Games, looked at hosting the games with somebody else, and those options were closed off to us. It’s much better, then, that we’re able to use that money for events such as the Champions League final, which will actually broadcast Wales to a huge audience around the world.