Op-Ed- Beijing Faces Post-Olympic Dilemmas

(ATR) Promises of legacy and sustainability look enticing on the pages of Olympic bid books, but can ring as hollow as empty stadiums in the aftermath of the Games.

Beijing is the latest Olympic city struggling to find a use for its biggest venue. The centerpiece of the Olympic Green is starting to look like just another white elephant.

The Bird's Nest, the 91,000-seat National Stadium, has become mainly a tourist attraction. Visitors pay around $7 to walk on the stadium floor, plus a bit more if they want to stand on the victory podium and pretend they're Usain Bolt.

Attendance is dwindling, though, and senior citizens have complained that they don't get a discount.

The stadium's capacity is supposed to decrease to 80,000 seats, but there is no long-term tenant. The football club, Guo'an, a Chinese Super League Team, was expected to move in, but backed out of a deal because rent was too expensive.

The only big event reportedly scheduled for the Bird's Nest is the opera "Turandot" on Aug. 8, the one-year anniversary of the 2008 Opening Ceremony. It will be directed by ceremonies maestro Zhang Yimou.

The IOC believed Beijing had plans in place to make it different from Sydney and Athens, cities that built gleaming new facilities that are mostly vacant today despite large maintenance costs.

Soon after Jacques Rogge became IOC president in 2001, he said: "Sydney built - against the advice of the IOC - a 125,000-seat stadium. Now they're struggling financially. I think we have to protect the cities themselves against what they are doing. We don't want to leave white elephants."

The latest movement in Sydney is to add a racetrack for cars to the Olympic Park - anything to bring in revenue and spectators.

As the Beijing Games concluded, Rogge proclaimed that "no white elephant has been built."

Will time prove him wrong? And can London and Vancouver deliver on their own promises?

Organizers for London 2012 thought they had their post-Olympic plan all figured out. They proposed knocking their 80,000 stadium down to 25,000 seats to house a lower-league football or rugby club as part of a mixed-use facility plan.

However, LOCOG chairman Sebastian Coe has insisted that athletics be the stadium's primary legacy, which has become a sticky problem. Football and rugby clubs don't want to play inside a track because sightlines are poor. Their fans like to be closer to the action.

Rogge is willing to compromise. "If the best solution is to transform the track into something else then we would be in favor of that," he said recently. "We had the same situation in Atlanta where the Olympic Stadium was changed into a baseball stadium, which kept an interest for sport."

Manchester, which hosted the Commonwealth Games, took out its track and converted its stadium into an English Premier League venue. The adjacent warm-up track became a regional athletics venue with 6,000 seats. Could London come up with a similar plan, albeit with a larger seating capacity?

That would preserve an Olympic sport legacy and also serve the community's needs.

Beijing is doing that with its other architectural marvel, the Water Cube, where Michael Phelps won eight gold medals. It will be converted into a water park and swimming center. More than 30 years ago, a similar conversion took place in Montreal, where the 1976 aquatics center is now a popular public facility with seven pools.

Other 2008 venues will be dismantled. The first will be the 15,000-seat Wukesong Sports Center baseball field. Baseball advocates lobbied for the facility to remain to help develop the sport in China, but organizers said it was always intended as a temporary venue.

At least money should be made on the baseball site. A shopping mall will be built in its place.

Written by Karen Rosen

Karen Rosen is an Atlanta-based reporter for Around the Rings and a guest contributor to this week's Op-Ed.

Op Ed is a weekly column of opinion and ideas from Around the Rings. Comments, as well as guest columns are welcomed: comment@aroundtherings.com