Sports Books Blog

I took Monday off from piloting the good ship SportsBooks to take in a Sports Journalists’ Association-organised trip around the 2012 Olympic Park in Stratford.

Very interesting and very informative and I can’t wait until 2012, although wishing away time at my age is foolish.

It wasn’t as big as I expected. Apparently even I will be able to walk from one end to the other in 25 minutes. It requires though a touch of Kirstie and Phil wisdom from ‘Location, Location, Location’ to see past the present décor and imagine what it will be like, but that’s not difficult.

Alex, our guide, told a bus load of cynical journalists  that the building was up to schedule, even ahead of it in some cases, which to my untutored eye appeared to be true. So I can’t see London giving journalists the usual “IOC worry at late state of Olympic facilities” story as the Games draw near. Still there’s always “ring of steel” because there’s bound to be one of those.

The Press and Broadcasting centre is going to be huge, although the first bit they are on is the broadcasting bit. The most important part has yet to start. The athletes’ village is well on its way and the aquatic centre is going to be amazing.

But I was disappointed with the main stadium. Perhaps because it looks smaller than I expected. Of course it isn’t finished but at the moment it doesn’t have the grandeur associated with Olympic stadiums.

It is going to be functional. All the catering elements are going to be in ‘pods’ so they can be taken off and used in other places. But I think my judgement was coloured by Alex confirming that after the Games are over the top tier of 55,000 seats will be removed, leaving a 25,000 seat athletics stadium.

Which offends me. In the first place I don’t think 80,000 is big enough for an Olympic stadium. It should be 100,000. And secondly why can’t London sustain an 80,000 athletics stadium?

It has been virtually the only capital city of any magnitude without a sizeable athletics stadium since White City stopped being used in the late 1960s. That was purpose built for the first London Games in 1908 and had a capacity of 150,000 although most of those were standing.

Berlin has a superb athletics stadium which staged the recent World Track & Field championships. Paris (more strictly St Denis) has the Stade de France. Brussels has Heysel, Moscow has Lushniki, Los Angeles has the Coliseum.

But in England we have Crystal Palace, capacity 17,000.

Of course we have Wembley and apparently they can take out seats at ground level to put in an athletics track but why can’t we have a permanent facility? Why can’t a city the size and importance of London sustain a Wembley and a large Olympic Stadium? I mentioned to a fellow journalist that in my view Olympic Stadiums ought to be like cathedrals, once built they had to stand there forever or until they fell down. “Sentimental bullshit” he said. Bullshit, no but sentimental certainly. I still get a frisson of excitement when I’m on a train and I spot the floodlights of a football ground.

Slicing the top from the Olympic Stadium means we will not be able to stage a world athletics championships or possibly even a European championships in east London. The New Stadium should house one of London’s football teams. Tottenham feel constrained at White Hart Lane. Why can’t they move to Stratford? It’s not far away and judging from the tatty streets around the Olympic Park they will feel at home.

It seems the reason we can’t have a big stadium with a running track is because football must not be watched from beyond a running track. Even one of SportsBooks authors, Stuart Fuller, whose book ‘Passport to Football’ we publish next month, feels that way.

Well he’s wrong and so is everyone else who feels that you can’t enjoy football with a running track in the way. True the players won’t hear your obscenities and see your crude gestures but you can still enjoy the flow of the game and the skills on view.

Wembley used to have a dog track in the way; they made money from greyhounds, more I’m told than they did from football. White City had a dog track too.

Maybe that’s what the new Olympic Stadium needs – a dog track. After all Walthamstow Stadium closed last year.

Still I got goose bumps as we pulled up briefly outside the stadium and glimpsed the inside. It was all concrete and builders lorries but for a moment I could visualise the track and the green in the middle.

Then it was off, under Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer pipe which ended the great London stink in the middle 1800s, and back through Stratford to Canary Wharf. As I said I can’t wait.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 11:11 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.