Riverside Sports Arena Ayr, Scotland

Ayr, a port town on the Firth of Clyde in the southwest of Scotland, attracts tourists with its picturesque sandy beaches, mild climate influenced by the Gulf Stream, and a view across the water to the Isle of Arran, the home of several popular whisky distilleries.

For the Scottish, Ayr is particularly significant since it is where Robert the Bruce held the first Scottish parliament in the early 14th century. Today, Ayr is one of the locations of the University of the West of Scotland, which offers one hundred graduate degree courses at a total of seven faculties. In its direct vicinity is the Riverside Sports Arena, built in 2022, which is used by students of the university and serves as the training centre for the Ayr Seaforth Athletic Club. For over 60 years, this traditional club has offered almost every classic athletics discipline, as well as special programmes for juniors, seniors and disabled people.

Following an investment of £8.5 million, the state-of-the-art indoor and outdoor sports arena now includes an indoor sprinting and jumping facility, a roofed stand with 250 seats, a changing pavilion, and a rugby/football field. Specially for track-and-field athletes, there is a 400-metre running track with eight lanes, an area for jumping and throwing disciplines, and a 60-metre indoor track with six lanes. All the tracks are equipped with Polytan Rekortan M in brick red, our globally established professional sports surface, which we offer in an indoor and an outdoor version. It is loved by professionals and amateurs alike for its excellent acceleration and high tread elasticity. In addition, Rekortan M is fast and offers high cushioning and excellent sport medical properties.

Due to country-specific emission limit values for indoor spaces, Rekortan M is well-suited to indoor athletics facilities. Unlike the outdoor version, the indoor version contains 100% rubber granules.

With 153 World-Athletics-certified installations worldwide, Rekortan M is the world’s most certified running track system. The synthetic surface celebrated its debut at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico – ever since, Rekortan has embodied high-performance running tracks for international competitions, training facilities and school sports facilities.

Moreover, our digital performance diagnostics system Polytan SMART has been installed at the Riverside Sports Arena. It is suitable for both running tracks and synthetic turf system, and can be integrated into both new and existing facilities with very little effort. Once fitted, the permanently installed timing gates are available at all times for precise time measurement – in any weather and for multiple athletes at once. Developed specially for amateur athletes who want to optimise their training, the free smartphone app Smart Run by Humotion is available to download from the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store. The smartphone is worn in a running belt. This allows the app to make use of the sensors in the smartphone, and measure all the relevant parameters in conjunction with the SMART timing gates. The measurements are then evaluated and analysed directly in the app. These include distance, time, number of steps and step frequency, both as interim results and absolute values.

For all professional athletes who want to train with as little weight yet as much precision as possible, we have made the DX5.0 sensor – weighing only 15 grams – available. This is attached to a special belt and worn on the body while training. In conjunction with the Polytan SMART timing gates, it records all the parameters, and displays and evaluates them either on the professional SmarTracks diagnostics software on a laptop, or directly in the Smart Run by Humotion app.

We have installed a total of 80 timing gates in the running track, the sprint track and the long jump at the Riverside Sports Arena. Scottish Athletics Ltd, the national umbrella association for athletics in Scotland, will use the Polytan SMART-equipped facility in Ayr for national competitions in the future. Polytan is the official partner of Scottish Athletics Ltd, which is associated with World Athletics via UK Athletics. In turn, Scottish Athletics comprises 150 athletics associations that offer people of all ages the opportunity to try out various athletics disciplines, as well as train and compete – from casual jogging, all the way through to the Olympic Games and Commonwealth Games.