Construction Delays Continue To Plague Zenit St. Petersburg Stadium

Russia Head of the Audit Chamber Sergei Stepashin said Monday that Zenit St. Petersburg's $1.1B stadium project's completion date has been "put back again and it may not open until 2017, a decade after construction work began," according to R-SPORT. The stadium is to host a 2018 World Cup semifinal, "but the new date means there could be a rush to prepare it for scheduled Confederations Cup games in 2017." Stepashin said, "The [completion] terms, in the best case, are the end of 2016 or the start of 2017.” Stepashin added that the city government's existing estimate of Dec. 2015 "was inflexible and failed to take into account any 'operational decisions' that may need to be made" (R-SPORT, 5/20).