Afternoon:
10°c
IOC chief paves the way for football
Pippa Crerar30 Oct 2008
OLYMPICS chief Jacques Rogge has said that London's main Olympic stadium does not need an athletics legacy after all.
He revealed he was more concerned that the 2012 Games should not leave behind any “white elephants”.
An athletics legacy was a key plank of the original bid and Mr Rogge's words appear to mark a shift in International Olympics Committee policy and open the door for a football club
moving to the Stratford venue.
The £525 million stadium has been the focus of a battle between the organisers of the London Games and Mayor Boris Johnson. But IOC chief Mr Rogge said: “If the best solution is to transform the track into something else then we would be in favour of that.
“We had the same situation in Atlanta where the Olympic Stadium was changed into a baseball stadium, which kept an interest for sport.”
The Mayor's advisers believe it could be cheaper in the long run to build a stadium in partnership with a football club than subsidise it as an athletics venue. However, Mr Rogge's remarks will disappoint 2012 chairman Sebastian Coe who has said the Stratford venue would be a “stadium with track and field as its primary legacy”.
UK Athletics, the sport's national governing body, is keen to use the stadium as a community athletics centre that could also stage national and international events. The original London 2012 statement said: “We have always said we want the stadium to be a multi-sport venue for elite and community use, with athletics an important part of that mix.”
The London Development Agency could now ditch the original plan to turn the 80,000-capacity stadium into an athletics venue holding 25,000 people.
British Olympics chiefs have met potential “anchor tenants” but talks with London-based football and rugby clubs have faltered over the issue of keeping an athletics element.
Mr Rogge's words could lead to a rethink by West Ham, whose talks with 2012 chiefs about a move to the stadium broke down two years ago.
Tottenham Hotspur sources say they would not rule out a move to Stratford if the price was right.
League One side Leyton Orient, the closest professional sports team to the site, are in talks with London 2012.
Reader views (1)
Interesting that a top Olympic official tacitly admits that an athletics stadium is a white elephant. Football, like it or not, pays its own way: the Olympic circus lives and breathes subsidy.
Leyton Orient have recently been sold the freehold of their ground for a song by the ever-obliging Waltham Forest Council, so moving out and turning it into a prime piece of building land (there are already hideous blocks of flats around the corners of the ground, after some very strange planning approvals) would be an obvious next step.
- Mdj, Leyton, e10 london, 06/11/2008 23:05
Report abuse
Matthew Beard, Sports News Correspondent, on Twitter
