HOWZAT

He speaks slowly, in accented English, choosing his words with the careful precision that a big man takes with small things. That caution will be useful. Turok and MidOcean hope to sweep up as the fitness market consolidates. Leap in too quickly and the same old problems will recur.

In the past, too many chains rushed to open clubs on infeasible leases as a land-grab for sites ensued. Now the market is fragmented, with big names accounting for a third of Britain’s estimated 3,800 clubs, and a variety of independent and local-authority-run sites competing alongside.

“There’s inevitably going to be consolidation,” says Christian Purslow, a partner at MidOcean, “and LA Fitness could be a beneficiary of that.”

Both Turok and Purslow argue cogently that the British fitness market is not over-supplied. They cite 15% club-membership penetration in America, compared with 7% here. Both believe the government will eventually have to work more closely with health chains as it sees the benefits in getting people to exercise more.

“Obesity costs British taxpayers £7 billion a year and inactivity a further £8 billion,” says Turok. “There’s no reason why we couldn’t be part of a consolidated programme to increase activity.”

LA Fitness is already experimenting with a new club format that may encourage government interest. Aimed at gym-averse individuals — no mirrors, tight Lycra discouraged — it is pitched as a medically driven centre where users can follow exercise programmes linked to conditions such as osteoporosis.

“We’ve opened two so far, in Kingston and Bedford,” says Turok. “We just want to research how to get to the next level of people.”

He contends that the government could work with health-club chains just as it works with private healthcare providers such as Bupa.

Unusually for an entrepreneur, Turok has no qualms about linking up with the public sector. But then few share his extraordinary background. His Latvian émigré grandfather was a successful businessman, his father a communist.

Shunted out of South Africa as a boy when his parents fled the apartheid regime, Turok was pushed around British schools, and suffered from his parents’ political obsessions and his own dyslexia, which was undiagnosed at that stage.

Branded as stupid, and with two very bright younger brothers — one is now a professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge, the other a professor of economics at Glasgow — he retreated into sport, but never lost confidence. “Dyslexics are blaggers,” he grins. “They learn to cope. And I’m like my dad — pretty determined.”

When being a PE teacher in Lambeth didn’t work out — “I had four children, I couldn’t afford it” — he took a job as a swimming coach at a David Lloyd centre, and found himself adept at making money.

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