London Update - Conservatives Want Stadium Anchor Tenant; Agency Overspends For Olympic Land

The Saracens and Northampton Saints match at Wembley Stadium on Sept. 12 attracted a big crowd (Getty Images)Wembley Success for Rugby Club Points to Legacy Future

How to make London’s 2012 stadium pay for itself once the Olympics are over may be a step closer to being resolved, after Saracens attracted 44,832 spectators to their Premiership rugby match with Northampton at Wembley.

The success of Saracens’ experiment has already prompted Edwards Griffiths, the chief executive of the club, to open talks with Wembley’s owners about staging further fixtures at the national football stadium.

Longer term, a move closer to the club’s heartland in Stratford – site of the Olympic stadium – may prove more attractive.

At LOCOG, it has also revived the idea of finding a professional sports team as “anchor tenant” for the Olympic stadium, to help meet maintenance costs post-2012.

“This was a platform, now we can go forward to take the club to a different level,” Griffiths said after the Wembley match. Saracens rent Watford’s soccer stadium, 24 miles outside London, for most of their home games.

The Olympic legacy company, which will run the park from 2013, may be forced to find an additional use for the $750 million stadium after the Conservative party announced that it wants a major change of policy.

There is likely to be a U.K. government election in 2010 and the ruling Labour party is expected to lose.

Hugh Robertson, shadow minister for the Olympics, believes another sport is necessary to make the legacy athletics stadium commercially viable (Getty Images)Hugh Robertson, the Conservative party’s spokesman on sport and the Olympics, said: “We have to make that stadium commercially viable in post-Olympic mode.

“The one way that I can see of making it commercially viable – because there will not be a huge pot of public money to keep the thing going – is to incorporate another sport’s use.

“I think most likely that will be football, alongside the world-class athletics use that we must guarantee because it was part of our bid.”

With the 2015 Rugby World Cup and the England 2018 World Cup bid both considering the Olympic stadium as a venue, it seems likely that the venue will need to be maintained with more than the 25,000 seats originally proposed by LOCOG.

Mayor Agency’s $250m Overspend on Olympic Land

External auditors appointed to investigate accounting discrepancies at the London Development Agency reported last week that there has been a $250 million overspend on land purchases for the Olympic Park – $100 million worse than originally feared.

The LDA had an original $1.6 billion budget for buying the land, but failed to budget properly.

The deficit will not affect the Olympic purchases, or the amounts paid for relocation and compensation costs to previous owners. But it will mean other projects in London will be hit through a lack of funds.

The investigation has taken a year to complete, and has led to complaints of poor financial controls and management at City Hall. “It was a serious goof,” said London Mayor Boris Johnson.

Briefs ...

... Thursday’s Olympic Board meeting is expected to finally rubber-stamp Woolwich as the shooting venue for 2012, despite lobbying from the British marksmen to upgrade existing facilities at the national center at Bisley. “The world shooting federation likes Woolwich, it is close to the Village and The new 2012 Olympics education logo (London 2012)at the heart of the Games, something that has not been the case at previous Olympics,” a LOCOG source told ATR.

... Reiss Evans, an 18-year-old graphic design student from Kent, was named Tuesday as the winner of a competition to provide an infill to the 2012 Olympic logo for use by schools and colleges that join the Get Set network – part of the official London 2012 education program. More than 11,000 schools and colleges across the U.K. are already using the Get Set resources, intended to spark young people’s enthusiasm for learning and the Games.

... Hadleigh Castle, the 2012 mountain biking site, will remain open as a legacy sports venue after the Games, following an agreement between LOCOG, Essex County Council and the park’s owners, the Salvation Army. The 550-acre site, which overlooks the Thames Estuary, and has the backdrop of the ruins of a 700-year-old castle, has sufficient climbs to satisfy the UCI, the world cycling body, of its suitability for an elite mountain bike course.

... Weymouth, the first 2012 Olympic venue to be completed, is hosting the final leg of the 2008-2009 ISAF Sailing World Cup Series this week. More than 700 sailors from 38 nations are competing in the Skandia Sail for Gold Regatta at the National Sailing Academy, with the medal races in the 10 Olympic and three Paralympic classes set to be staged Saturday.

Written by Steven Downes

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