hitthepost
Norm Smith Medallist
So you're actually saying nobody in the world is smart enough to design a stadium that is workable for 110k to watch athletics and then become a workable 80k rectangular stadium, that it HAD to have a low seating bowl on the wings and seats behind the goals 30m from the pitch? Hell no wonder the aliens still bypass our planet!The private float of the stadium was a flop back in 1998 or 1999. Less than 1/3rd of the units to own the stadium, which also included the rights to all the Olympics events there were subscribed for by the public, so yes they looked at multiple uses after the Olympics but nothing was locked in when they designed the stadium with any deals with the AFL and CA. That happened after the Olympics.
Look at the Olympic stadiums between Melbourne and Sydney - ie Rome, Tokyo, Mexico, Munich, Montreal, Moscow, LA, Seoul, Barcelona and Atlanta. All oval stadiums in countries and cities where rectangle sports are the dominate sports. Not one of those stadiums, except for Atlanta, as I described in one of my posts above, went through major renovations, rebuilds etc after the Olympics to accommodate those rectangle sports. It obviously helped that the stadium funding came from NBC and other Olympic sponsors. They basically paid for the conversion and set it up before it was to be built to be converted and leased to the Atlanta Braves owned by Ted Turner and it wasn't a rectangle sport, it needed a bigger field than a rectangle but it didn't need an oval as big as Aussie Rules.
Neither has the stadium in Athens or Beijing. In Rio the Maracana was used for the opening and closing ceremonies and athletics stadium was the home ground for Botafogo in tha Brasilian Serie A comp and capacity was expanded temprarily from 46k to 60k. This was the first time the athletics stadium wasn't the main stadium.
It will happen again in LA in 2028 when the LA Coliseum hosts athletics like 1932 and 1984, but the ceremonies will be at the new Los Angeles Stadium at Hollywood Park which is a rectangle stadium that can host 100k for the Olympics compared to the Coliseum's 80k capacity after the latest changes.
London stadium was designed to be an 80k capacity macho set and pulled apart to have a capacity of 25k but still maintain an athletics track as the new home of British athletics.
But there was a lot of debate about its post Olympics use and they decided to reduce capacity and have these dodgy movable seats at ground level that sits on the athletics track. West Ham won the right to have it as there home ground starting with the 2016-17 season. They have moved the seats back once to allow the 2017 IAAF World Champions but the track is still there, not grass and some decent repairs had to occur when they moved the seats back before the IAAF World Champs were held.
But the majority of seats, approx 2/3rds of new 60k capacity are still an oval distance from the centre of the pitch. The original stadium cost £486 million and the renovations cost £274 million.
People in those cities have accepted watching rectangle sports in a large oval stadiums. It looks like Sydneysiders haven't and have had a good whinge about it. I think Rob got it right that the crowds are **** because it's in Sydney.
So for a stadium that the public float flopped, nobody from an economic point of view could justify spending about $300m to reconfigure it using the London Stadium as an example of having to spend approx 50% of the original cost to reconfigure it, for a more permanent rectangle when crowds in Sydney would be marginally better.