From the BBC:
West Ham are in talks with Newham Council over a joint bid to occupy the Olympic Stadium after the 2012 Games….The east London club and council hope the arena, in Newham borough, will feature “both football and athletics”. Interested parties have an eight-week deadline to submit plans, with the Olympic Park Legacy Company set to make a decision on the stadium’s future use by March 2011.
A joint statement from West Ham and Newham Council read: “The proposal would be to make the venue a vibrant centre of sport, culture and education, featuring both football and athletics. “Open day and night all year round, it would have an active community use, inspiring learning and achievement and helping to create a better quality of life for tens of thousands.”
They’re proposing an “Olympic visitor centre and football museum” on the site, which might help bridge any uncomfortable culture gap between Saturday afternoon shoppers at Stratford’s new, monster Westfield and Saturday afternoon footie fans.
Could it happen? The involvement of Newham might reassure the OPLC that there’s more to the Hammers’ interest than presumptuous publicity-seeking – the borough’s ebullient Mayor, Sir Robin Wales, is on the newly-formed company’s board. But there remains the big, awkward question of a Grand Prix-standard athletics track.
London pledged to maintain one at the stadium as part of its bid to get the Games, and Sebastian Coe remains publicly dedicated to doing so. He too might be encouraged by Newham’s interest, given that Wales is on the Locog board too. But Coe must know as well as anyone that you’d be lucky to fill the stadium more than once a year for an athletics event, even at its presently proposed post-Games capacity of 25,000. That would mean, public subsidy and plenty of it. Today’s budget seems likely to subject such an ambition to a reality test.
Grilled about the stadium’s future by the London Assembly recently, OPLC chair Margaret Ford and chief executive Andrew Altman were pressed to admit that Seb’s dream is unlikely to come true. They stuck stoutly to the line that their formal invitations to interested parties includes athletics provision being a prerequisite. But that rich, long term tenant could only be a big-time football club, and big-time football clubs don’t want athletics tracks round their pitches.
How could the Hammers and Newham plan resolve that fundamental tension and host “both football and athletics,” as their joint statement promises? Could something clever be done with removable seats, or have they been persuaded by the words of the Ford who told the Assembly that as a season ticket-holder at Stamford Bridge she often found the ground’s sight lines restricted. The advantage of being a little further from the action, she explained, is that you can actually see more of it.
This opinion was shared by Labour’s Murad Qureshi, a big sports fan. He mentioned the Olympic stadium in Rome which is home to both Roma and Lazio FCs and also hosted 1990 World Cup matches. These included the tournament’s opening fixture between holders Argentina and Cameroon. I was there and can still see Maradona heading for the dressing room after his team was turned over by the impertinent Africans. Would I have had such a memorable view had their not been a running track around the pitch?
Questions, questions, with no clear answers as yet. And here’s another one. What if West Ham is no longer a Premier League club in a few weeks’ time?
Olympic games 2012West Ham UnitedLondonDave Hillguardian.co.uk
