An international martial arts championship organized by Michael Jackson’s former bodyguard has been thrown into disarray by the sudden closure of GL1 leisure centre. Matt Fiddes, who protected the late American singer for ten years, can’t believe that Aspire Sports and Cultural Trust has shut down.
Fiddes, who runs the Matt Fiddes Martial Arts British Championship event, had planned for 1,500 participants and 1,000 spectators to attend the event on October 15 at GL1. He is now hoping that Gloucester City Council will allow them access to the site so that the event can still go ahead.
According to Fiddes, participants ranging from three to 70 years old have been preparing for the championships for six months. Many people have already booked flights and hotels in Gloucestershire, with attendees flying in from all over the world. Fiddes expressed his astonishment at the trust going into liquidation, especially since his company received an invoice from Aspire just last week.
Fiddes said, ‘We’ve got 1,000 people who are supposed to be attending in two weeks on Sunday for our international championships. They’ve booked flights to the UK and hotels all over Gloucestershire. You don’t just wake up one day and find out that you’ve gone into liquidation. That takes weeks and weeks of notice. Now we’ve got kids from Australia coming and everywhere for our martial arts championships and we’re screwed. No one has had the decency to give us enough notice.’
He continued, ‘On a Friday afternoon they ring us to tell us, by the way you can’t have it. It’s an absolute joke. The council should let us in and honour their commitment. We’ve paid them and all upfront. We’ve got the seating organized and we can’t turn this around two weeks later on a Friday afternoon. We booked this 12 months ago. We run the biggest martial arts training in the world with 50,000 students. It’s our international championship and we hold it once a year. Never in our lives did we ever think we’d be facing this. Their attitude is ‘well you’ll have to find somewhere else’. It’s not as easy as that because they booked Gloucestershire hotels and planes. Kids have been training on camps for this. It’s ridiculous. It’s a massive venue, how can I find one like that? You don’t just wake up one day knowing your business is going down. This would have been months ago they had indications of this. They should have contacted all the people with big events and rentals. The council is not responding to our calls. We’ve tried to get them to respond to see if they’ll let us in by any chance. They sent us an invoice last week. They would have known by then. With flights and everything we would have spent £50,000.’
Aspire Sports and Cultural Trust has stated that it can no longer trade legally and has made the difficult decision to go into liquidation. Gloucester City Council leaders express their shock at the decision, as they had an agreement in principle with the trust to extend their contract until September 2024. Both GL1 and Oxstalls Sports Park are currently closed and will remain so until further notice.