Steve Lawrence claims Olympic stadium legacy not feasible – London Olympics 2012
Steve Lawrence, who is the architect of the Olympic plan, confessed while giving an interview to the Sky Sports News that an immediate review of the Olympic stadium’s legacy plan is required.
Lawrence expressed his views on the matter in the following manner, “I care a great deal about the project. It's a project I started in the first place and I want the legacy in east London to last for generations. When I was working on this back in the 90's
and in 2001, that was my motivation. I felt that this could bring about great change and I saw this process turning into a debacle and it was not generating a sensible legacy. I still believe that it is unrealistic to predicate the legacy use on athletics.
It can only work with a football use in the stadium.”
The mastermind architect of the Olympic legacy plan confessed that he had approached the European Union Commission to register an anonymous complaint by the telephone. The complaint had been made by the architect last year in the month of August expressing
concern about the lack of transparency in the bidding procedure to be followed for the use of the Olympic stadium once the London 2012 Olympic Games reached their close on August 12.
Lawrence cited the lack of transparency in the bidding process as a problem because it could lead towards leaning heavily on the tax payer in terms of generating funds.
According to the plan, the future sustainability of the Olympic stadium would be based upon a joint football athletics legacy. However, Lawrence is of the opinion that the cash flows generated from this collaborated legacy would not be enough to economically
sustain the Olympic stadium.
While presenting his argument, Lawrence quoted the examples of the 1928 stadium in Amsterdam as well as the Barcelona stadium and the Munich stadium. All three of these main Olympic venues could not sustain themselves just on the cash flows generated from
a sports legacy.
On the other hand, the stadiums had to bring in cash funds from the state in order to be economically feasible.
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