London’s £701M Olympic Stadium is "so good they built it twice," according to Owen Gibson of the London GUARDIAN. Or so "those responsible hope visitors will be saying once they start streaming back into the arena following a substantial and controversial rebuilding exercise" to make it suitable not only for athletics but also for motor racing, cricket, concerts and Premier League club West Ham United. Others "remain to be convinced." The exterior of the stadium "has become part of the Stratford landscape amid an ever-shifting patchwork of construction work on the Olympic Park that is starting to coalesce into a recognisable whole." Yet the "huge cost and controversy over the public funds used to pay for it hang over the stadium like a cloud." The Anniversary Games next weekend will "provide an early stern test of the public appetite for athletics at the stadium." Wheelchair racer Hannah Cockroft: "It’s a lovely track and a beautiful stadium. I was worried about coming back. It looks different but just as nice, a bit cosier." It "will host five Rugby World Cup matches in the autumn on the new Desso pitch." Next year West Ham will try "to make the 54,000-seat arena feel like home after 111 years at the Boleyn Ground at Upton Park." The £272M conversion (not far off the £280M the stadium was originally slated to cost) "is all but complete and the effect is at once impressive and disconcerting." Nothing "has changed and yet hardly anything remains the same." The only part of the stadium that remains is that which was supposed to be temporary (the upper tier), while the section that was to be permanent has been replaced (the bottom tier, swapped for new retractable seats).
Around the perimeter, the number of toilets "has doubled and a covered concourse introduced to house catering outlets." To all intents and purposes, it "has been completely rebuilt as part of a huge, expensive engineering puzzle." Even elements that appear to have been retained, such as the distinctive white struts that form the exoskeleton, "had to be replaced to support a huge new cantilevered roof that is the biggest of its kind in Europe." LLDC Deputy Chair Neale Coleman "has led work on the Olympics at the Greater London Authority since 2000." He "is blunt about why the final bill is so high." Coleman: "The big decision was to go for full retractable seats. You either do it properly or you don’t do it at all. People underestimate the extent to which the Olympic Stadium was temporary." He said that the idea that a multipurpose stadium "should have been built in the beginning is revisionist 'rubbish' given the lack of interest then from West Ham, public and political pressure to keep costs down and the urgent need to start building." The "calculated gamble" taken by West Ham’s co-Owners David Gold and David Sullivan and sealed by Vice-Chair Karren Brady (in return for a rumored healthy bonus) is that "despite no longer owning their own ground they will vault into a different financial league." From a "slick sales office" in Stratford’s Westfield shopping center, West Ham is "already close to selling out the hospitality suites that are all but complete above the halfway line" (GUARDIAN, 7/18).
