Summer Should Melbourne Bid For The 2028 Games

[Jpw22511]

2nd Brisbane NRL team??

What's it used for now?

Athletics and the odd concert.

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

Would need alot of work to bring it up to scratch then what do they do with it? Broncos won't leave suncorp and the Lions wont be able to play there.

If they copy the original London Olympics main stadium model, they will turn it into an 80,000 stadium for the Olympics and leave it as the national athletics centre as its legacy.

Build it like a big meccano set and then pull it apart after the games and leave it as permanent 25,000 seater athletics stadium and it can be multi-use for smaller community events as well as say host 5-10 consecutive national athletics championships.

London stadium was always going to be part of a bid for 2017 IAAF World Championships by British Athletics which they won the hosting rights and copying Beijing stadium being used in 2008 for the Olympics and then 2015 for the world championships. The idea was to keep more than 25k capacity if London won the 2017 World Champs but eventually bring it down to 25k capacity. London won the 2017 hosting rights in November 2011.

But the pressure was on to keep its capacity high, and use it more than just for athletics.

In London, pre and post Olympics 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.

I don't know what the original cost was to renovate it down to a 25k stadium in the original plans.

 

[Roogal]

GOD no! The Tokyo Olympics were announced to be budgeted at $15 billion a week ago. Rio's games cost about $12 billion, London's $8 billion, Beijing's $7billion, and Athens was $5 billion. Melbourne is about to spend $50 billion building a much needed underground rail link connecting its major rail lines from 2022, the new North East link will cost about $5 billion, the new underground rail link under the city a further $7 billion and the Westgate tunnel $5 billion. I reckon that Melbourne has better things to spend its money on right now rather than a wasteful and extravagent three-week long piss up for international athletes and the Olympic five-ringed circus. Let some other mug country pick up the tab for a change!

For the record, Brisbane and Queensland shouldn't be bidding for this in 2032 either, they cannot afford to waste upwards of $20 billion (2030s dollars) on such a wasteful pursuit at the expense of drought ridden farmers, and the rest of a huge state that is constantly begging for development funding across its regions.

Face it! The Olympics are a bad and bloody expensive idea.

 

[Roogal]

Great point about the cost of security. I remember the Sydney Olympics security wasn't much more than people (non police) in embroidered red shirts. That was in a pre 9/11 world. Resources and money required for security have drastically changed since.

That was the impression that SOCOG wanted people to have, but I was serving in the Army in what was called OPERATION GOLD in 2000. Sydney had some 10,000 NSW and temporary interstate Police borrowed from QLD and VIC, 1000 AFP plus some 5,000 Australian Army personnel (many of us were dressed in King Gees so that we weren't obvious) deployed into Holsworthy Army Base in addition to the 2000 who were based there permanently at the time. In addition at the time there were about 300 SAS and Commandos stationed out of the former Artillery School at North Head.

Sydney was locked down as tight as it had ever been since WW2. Millions were spent installing CCTV cameras across the city and around venues, all linked to a new central response headquarters. But it was a credit to organisers that the massive security presence largely went unnoticed. We were mindful throughout the games of the pipe bombing that had occurred only four years earlier at Atlanta.

 

[Roogal]

Where do they build an 80k stadium?

How about Bern in Switzerland. The Swiss are good at taking money off other countries wth no questions asked. They've contributed nothing to internatonal peace keeping in 500 years. Did nothing to rid Europe of Nazism, but still hold much of the Jewish money that was looted by the Nazis in their banks to this day. They have never hosted any world event but are the richest country per-capita in Europe. Yet they coast along happiy under the world's radar letting countries like Australia, Canada and England contantly do the heavy lifting.