The maintenance of the Olympic facilities is a hot potato for the host cities of the Games now facing Tokyo, which has close precedents for a successful recycling of venues, as London did, but also for the more obvious ruin of the stadiums. from Athens.
The National Stadium in which the 2020 Games will be closed today cost 156.9 billion yen (1.31 billion euros / 1.410 billion dollars) and its maintenance amounts to 2.4 billion yen annually (20 million euros / 21 million dollars) , to mention an example of what the organizers will have to assume in the short term.
The potential of Tokyo’s main facility to host sporting competitions or mass cultural events is also unknown in the current pandemic context.
RÍO, A PLAN FIVE YEARS DELAYED
Five years after the Rio 2016 Games, the mayor of the city, Eduardo Paes, announced on the 22nd the new uses that some of the facilities of the Olympic Park will have, turned into a “white elephant” due to its abandonment.
Three coliseums will be municipal schools and other spaces will be offered under concession to private initiative, according to the new plan.
The Olympic Park includes, among other facilities, the Velodrome, the Aquatic Park, the Rio Olympic Arena and the Olympic Tennis Center, all of them located in Barra de Tijuca, to the west of the city.
The stadiums that were built for handball and for water activities will be dismantled and four schools will be built with their structures, a project that will have an estimated cost of 78 million reais (about 15 million dollars) and that, according to the mayor, should start in September to be ready in 2023.
The educational centers will be located in four neighborhoods in the west of Rio, with low-income populations, and each one will have a capacity for 245 students.
Arena 3, the only coliseum that is in operation, under municipal management, will not be dismantled but will also be converted into a school with 24 classrooms and a gym where classes of free sports activities will be offered to students.
The idea of converting the pavilions into schools is not new and under that criterion they were built for the Games, but after five years it is still in the air due, according to Paes, to the inefficiency of the past municipal administration.
The tennis center and other pavilions of the Olympic Park will be awarded in concession to the private initiative and the tender is scheduled for next November. The mayor’s office will also build an athletics track that will be delivered to the Brazilian Olympic Committee (COB).
The Olympic facilities cost more than 40,000 million reais (about 8,000 million dollars at the current exchange rate) and today they are in abandonment, deteriorated and dotted by the corruption scandals left by the millionaire diversions of public resources discovered during the works.
REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE: THE LONDON EXAMPLE
Four years earlier, in 2012, the London Games were held. Nine years ago the British Government created the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), a body dedicated to managing the development of the Elizabeth II Olympic Park and its surroundings after the sporting event.
Built in the east of the capital around four large neighborhoods, the park has given way to new residential and office areas, after the dismantling of temporary venues, such as the hockey or basketball pavilion, whose stands, in a example of recycling, they were moved to the new stadium of the Barnet football club.
The provisionally erected areas were also removed from the Aquatic Center, which has reduced its capacity from 17,000 to just 3,000, while the Copper Box, which housed handball, modern pentathlon or fencing, now hosts the team’s matches. London Lions basketball court.
The LLDC found it more difficult to reinvent the Olympic Stadium, the central focus of the Games with the athletics events and the opening and closing ceremonies, which drew 80,000 spectators.
After the Olympic event, its capacity was reduced to 60,000 seats, with a view to remaining a permanent athletics stadium, but, in 2016, it finally became the “home” of West Ham United, an English Premier League team.
At the time renamed London Stadium, it is now one of the UK’s most active venues as, in addition to football matches, it hosts track and field events, rugby matches and other events, such as concerts and festivals.
WINTER GAMES, A SECOND CHOICE FOR BEIJING
Beijing will be the first city in history to host both the summer and winter Olympics, and some of the venues that were used in the 2008 Olympics will also be used in the event that will take place next February in the Chinese capital.
Among them stands out the Bird’s Nest – nickname by which the National Stadium ended up being known – which until now had only sporadically hosted events such as concerts and friendly football matches and which will host the opening and closing ceremonies of the Winter Games in 2022.
The National Aquatic Center, known as “El Cubo de Agua”, will also be used to host the curling competition, as well as the National Indoor Stadium for ice hockey.
The Wukesong Sports Center, home to the 2008 Games and 2019 World Cup basketball tournament, will also host ice hockey matches, while the National Speed Skating Oval, erected over the Olympic Park built for 2008, will be venue of the ice speed skating competition.
Furthermore, the Olympic Green Tennis Center, built for the 2008 Olympic Games, is now the venue for the China Open, while the building that hosted the fencing events is now a Convention Center for exhibitions and conferences.
ATHENS, THE MOST NEGATIVE CASE
The 2004 Athens Games are par excellence the negative example of the waste of public funds that the Olympic Games can entail if they are not taken advantage of in the long term. Almost 9,000 million euros of public money fell on deaf ears and became one of the biggest germs for the economic misery that Greece lived after.
The cradle of the Modern Games has hardly known how to take advantage of anything that was built then. Ironically, almost the best preserved is the Panathinaikó stadium, which opened 125 years ago for the first contemporary games. It is there that the goal of the Athens marathon continues to be today, which, except in a pandemic, is celebrated religiously every year.
What remains of Athens 2004 is basically ruin.
Even at the few Olympic venues open for sporting or cultural events, the lack of maintenance is evident. In some, even minimal reforms have not been carried out since the Olympics ended.
The emblematic dome of the Olympic stadium in Athens – where the two most important clubs in the city, Panathinaikós and AEK, play at home – designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and that cost 130 million euros, it is one of the places where time and lack of care has made the most impact.
Of the rest of the facilities of the large Olympic complex, only the indoor stadium is regularly used by the Panathinaikós basketball team.
Other facilities have been completely reinvented, such as the badminton center, outside the complex, which today is a theater, another of the great Hellenic passions.