Gerry Cox
WHEN London won the right to stage the 2012 Olympic Games, it was supposed to usher in a great new era for sport in general and athletics in particular, not just in England’s capital but throughout the country.
The centrepiece of the bid was the legacy of inspiration that would behind by the games, and central to this would be the grand Olympic Stadium, costing more than half a billion Euros and an iconic landmark in London.
Who then, in 2005, would have foreseen the unholy row that is going on now, and the utter mess that the situation is threatening to become?
Having found no-one willing or able to fund a viable plan to retain the Olympic Stadium as “a purpose-built venue with athletics at its core”, the Olympic Park Legacy Company, who have to find a use for it after 2012, have whittled down the options to proposal from West Ham and Tottenham Hotspur.
Final submissions went in to the OPLC yesterday, and their decision should be announced next Friday, and the world is now watching to see what will happen, especially because of all the controversy that has been stirred by the rival bids.
West Ham want to retain the athletics facilities and add a football pitch, roof, permanent toilets and the other essentials that make a modern football ground.
Their move down the road to Stratford is controversial enough – many of their fans do not want to leave Upton Park after 100 or so years there, and critics argue that football and athletics cannot co-exist satisfactorily in the same stadium, which was never designed for anything other than a one-off event – the Olympic Games. It has none of the infrastructure of a football stadium, and will cost up to 150m Euros to convert, and the concern is where this money will come from. West Ham are already over 100m Euros in debt and its partners are UK Athletics and the Newham, one of the UK’s poorest boroughs. Will someone foot this bill? Or will it join the long list of Olympic Stadia worldwide that have become white elephants?
But that is nothing compared to the storm of controversy surrounding Tottenham’s proposal to dismantle the stadium completely and put their own 60,000-seater football only ground on the site.
Spurs already have planning permission for a new 55,000-seater stadium to be rebuilt just yards from their current home at White Hart Lane, which is too small, at 36,000 capacity, to allow the club to compete financially with the likes of Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea.
But moving six miles to Stratford is now their preferred option, allowing them to build a 60,000 seater. It is easy to see why Tottenham want to move to Stratford, on the doorstep of the UK’s financial centre, a superb transport hub and very visible from Canary Wharf and the City’s towers. Imagine the value of naming rights, compared with the dingy backwater of Tottenham (and I know how grim it is because I grew up there and my office is there). And it will cost almost 200m Euros less than the 500m Euro cost of redeveloping White Hart Lane, only half of which will be spent building the stadium.
The rest is the extra cost incurred in redeveloping Haringey, the transport links and satisfying those who want to retain a handful of listed buildings near the ground.
So the move makes great commercial sense for Spurs but tramples on football’s sensitivities and horrifies just about everyone else, including many of their own fans. The “We Are N17” protest group is gathering pace, with protests at matches and over 6,500 fans signing their online petition so far, and many more to come.
Add to this protest group West Ham, the athletics world and those taxpayers who have funded the Olympic Stadium so far, as well as most neutrals, and you can see why Tottenham’s move to Stratford looks doomed.
Lamine Diack, head of the IAAF, has even argued that taking athletics out of Stratford will be the death knell of Britain’s reputation for integrity in sport.
The possibility of a ‘third way’ has even been touted, whereby both football club proposals are rejected and it is retained, as was originally planned, as a specialist athletics venue for 25,000. But who would fund that?
Even the decision-making process is controversial. The OPLC has three of its 14 voting members who have links with the West Ham proposal, including Tessa Sanderson, the former Olympic gold medallist. What a mess!
Perhaps it would be best to go back to the drawing board – if only the stadium had been better designed in the first place, like the City of Manchester one was. That way a move from, say, West Ham to Stratford could have been as seamless and free of controversy as Manchester City’s from Maine Road. At the time, many City fans did not want to leave their spiritual home, but ask them now and few would return.
But a decision is now only a week away, and one club or other is going to be playing football in Stratford in five years’ time – will it be the lesser of two evils?
Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/S4y34vbPLVI/post.aspx
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