London Games Over, Future of Olympic Stadium Remains Uncertain
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Version 0 of 1. LONDON — In “Twenty Twelve,” a satirical British television series last year that mocked the shambolic efforts of the fictional Olympic Deliverance Commission to organize the Summer Games, the committee at one point faces a terrible problem: It has somehow failed to find a future use for its 80,000-seat Olympic Stadium. An official known as the “head of sustainability” is reduced to begging an obscure soccer team and the owner of a defunct dog-racing outfit to consider moving in. Things have not yet descended to that sorry point in real life, but the fact remains that nearly six months after the Olympics ended in a burst of self-congratulation for Britain, there is no firm plan in place for the stadium. The most likely tenant, the West Ham United soccer team in the top-level Premier League, is still negotiating the terms of a possible move. It is a thicket of a process that began some time ago, that has been repeatedly thwarted and delayed by financial, logistical and legal obstacles, and that by no means has a certain outcome. Even if the team does succeed in its latest, reconfigured bid to secure a 99-year lease, it will probably not be able to move in until 2016, two years behind schedule. The delays have frustrated not just West Ham, but also legislators monitoring the financial legacy of the $14.3 billion London Games. Legacy was one of the catchwords of the bid, along with sustainability, with organizers emphasizing again and again that they had viable plans in place for every new structure they built — particularly the stadium, the centerpiece of the new Olympic Park. “The problem is that there are so many promises that have been reversed that it’s hard to know what promises to believe,” said John Biggs, the chairman of the budget committee at the London Assembly, speaking of the stadium. The tussling over the stadium’s future illustrates a perennial problem for Olympic hosts: how to find post-Games uses for the beautiful, splashy, exorbitantly expensive sports arenas they are required to build to secure the Games in the first place. “You only have to look around the world at some of the Olympic stadiums that have been built,” Sam Allardyce, West Ham’s manager, told The Times of London last summer. “They’re white elephants now. There are weeds growing there. The Olympic Park is a fantastic place, but it can’t be left to rack and ruin. If a club with the history and fan base and potential of West Ham don’t go there, the concern would be that the park is left empty the vast majority of the time.” In many ways, London has done a much better job than many of its predecessors in that it has successfully secured a future for most of its new Olympic sites. Some, like those for basketball and field hockey, are being dismantled and removed. Others, like the aquatics center, are being reconfigured as new public sports centers. The park, set over 560 acres in a once-derelict section of East London, is to reopen in stages, beginning this summer. But its financial success depends in part on what happens to Olympic Stadium, the one site capable of bringing in tens of thousands of people at a time. Officials say they hope it will be used this summer for yet-to-be-scheduled rock concerts, part of a broader program of concerts and festivals at the park, while its long-term future is being worked out. “For as long as the stadium is not attracting visitors, it is potentially blowing a hole in the wider business plan for the whole Olympic Park,” Biggs said. Much of the problem stems from what appears to have been poor initial decisions. When the stadium was built, the post-Games plan called for it to be drastically reduced in size — it is designed roughly along the lines of a layer cake, with removable tiers — then used as a 25,000-seat track and field site. But track and field competitions rarely draw more than several thousand spectators at a time. “There was an element of hokey cokey in that first proposition,” Biggs said. So the organizers came up with a new idea: find a soccer team to move in. West Ham was the obvious choice and the favorite of the London mayor, Boris Johnson. Officials were so optimistic about the prospect that they slyly alluded to it in the opening ceremony, sneaking “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” West Ham’s theme song, into the program. But the team’s earlier efforts to buy the stadium were stymied by a series of legal actions from two other soccer teams, Leyton Orient and Tottenham Hotspur, who worried that if West Ham moved into the fancy new stadium, it would steal their fans. The legal issues threatened to drag on indefinitely, and West Ham withdrew its bid. Last year it came back with a different proposal: to lease the stadium for 99 years. But three other groups submitted opposing bids, and it was not until last month that the London Legacy Development Corporation, which operates the stadium, announced that West Ham had emerged as the “preferred bidder” in the new process. The two sides are now arguing over the details of the deal, which would also include sharing the stadium with track and field events. One issue is that track and field stadiums, with their running tracks, have larger footprints than soccer stadiums, and no soccer fan wants to sit far back from the action. Some stadiums have solved this by installing retractable seats, but not the London stadium. “If it had been thought through properly, which it wasn’t, it never would have been simply a 78,000-seater,” said Dee Doocey, a former member of the London Assembly who is now a member of the House of Lords. “The only way it would have worked was if it had been built with retractable seats, and it wasn’t.” No one will put an official figure on the eventual cost of reconfiguring the stadium, a refitting that would probably include installing the new seats, reducing the overall size to 60,000 seats and extending the roof, but news reports have estimated the cost from about $240 million to about $320 million. One of the many financial issues is who will bear the brunt of the total expense. “If West Ham wants retractable seats, it should pay for them,” Doocey said. Another possible obstacle comes in the scrappy person of Barry Hearn, the sharp-elbowed chairman of Leyton Orient, a soccer team based not far from Olympic Park, who has succeeded in making life very difficult for West Ham despite playing two levels below the Premier League. Hearn, who wants his team to work out some kind of shared-tenancy arrangement with West Ham at the stadium (this is highly unlikely), said he would wait to see what happened with West Ham’s bid before deciding whether to go ahead with any new lawsuits. “If they move to a 60,000-seater and offer cheap and discounted tickets, as they say they will, that means we’ll be in a very uncompetitive marketplace,” Hearn said. “They’ll be offering Premier League tickets at cheaper prices than we’re offering.” Leyton Orient has been operating for 130 years, but Hearn said that could all end if West Ham is successful. “It’s a bit like Walmart moving in next door to the local greengrocer,” he said. “I think we’d go out of business.” The delays drag on. In November, Ed Warner, the chairman of U.K. Athletics, said the whole thing was turning into a “Stratford farce.” He told reporters, “All of the legacy use was scheduled to start in two years’ time, and now it might be four years’ time, which strikes me as ludicrous.” Stephen Knight, the deputy chairman of the London Assembly’s budget committee, said, “They really should have sorted it all out before.” |