Thursday, July 30, 2015

PICHA:HUU NDIYO UWANJA WA OLYMPIC UTAKAOTUMIWA NA WESTHAM KATIKA MITANANGE YA EPL

The Olympic Stadium in Stratford is gradually being converted into a ground that can host football as it becomes West Ham’s home for the 2016/17 season.

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 the public funds used to pay for it hang over the stadium like a cloud.

The £272m conversion (not far off the £280m the stadium was originally stated 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 triangular floodlights have been removed and apparently inverted (they are in fact new structures, though the light fittings have been retained).

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).

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.

Vaulting over the existing structure and constructed using techniques usually employed to build North Sea oil rigs, it hovers above the upper tier and will cover all of the 21,000 West Ham fans in the lower one once the seats are rolled forward in football (or rugby) mode.

The hope is that it will also help boost the acoustics, retaining an atmosphere that would otherwise drift off into the E20 air in the expansive bowl. The London Legacy Development Corporation desperately hopes that flinging open the doors to the stadium again, at least temporarily, will help justify its arguments for spending so much public money on making it a multi-purpose stadium.

Neale Coleman, deputy chairman of the LLDC, has led work on the Olympics at the Greater London Authority since 2000. He is blunt about why the final bill is so high. “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,” argues Coleman of a bill that swelled to more than £700m after the cost of the roof soared.

Coleman says 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. Afterwards, he says, the choice was stark. “The real choice was either to demount the whole thing, which you could have done with a 25,000 plan which would have been pretty unsatisfactory. Or you could have knocked the whole thing down.”

West Ham will pay just £15m towards the £272m conversion costs and annual rent of around £2.5m. In return, West Ham argue, they give the stadium a sustainable future.

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 rumoured healthy bonus) is that despite no longer owning their own ground they will vault into a different financial league.

Neale Coleman concedes more could be done on the park to evoke memories of 2012 and to recognise its sporting heritage – the bell that Bradley Wiggins chimed at Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony will be restored to pride of place in the stadium before it fully reopens next year. Whether it will ring in a glorious new era for a stadium that has already witnessed its share of drama and controversy in its short life or become the backdrop for a bitter battle over its legacy and cost, only time will tell. One thing is clear: nostalgia alone will not pay the bills and its post-Games life starts here.

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