FORMER Olympic host cities are littered with white elephants built in a construction frenzy that precedes the Games, but Beijing is confident its sparkling venues will not meet the same fate.
The challenge is illustrated by Athens, where nearly all the venues built for the 2004 Games now lie empty and continue to cost millions of dollars to maintain every year, casting a pall over the city’s Olympic legacy.
The need to build sustainable and functional venues has now become a key aspect of the Olympic bidding process and International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said Beijing had succeeded.
He said many venues had been embedded into universities, ensuring their continued use in the future, sometimes on a daily basis.
There were 31 venues at the Beijing Olympics, but only 12 were new. Eight were temporary and six were built inside universities.
Experts broadly agreed with Rogge, although they said it would be a challenge for the two flashiest and most expensive venues — the “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium and the National Aquatics Center, known as the “Water Cube.”
“Despite the size of the venues, the population in Beijing is so big that there should be potential for full usage after an adjustment period,” said Susan Brownell, an expert on Chinese sport.
Stephane Vernay, a partner at the design company that worked on some of the Beijing venues, said the only way to make significant returns on the initial investment was to have a sports club residing permanently within the stadium.
The Beijing Guo’an soccer club, a Chinese Super League team, said it was in discussions to do just that.
Sun Weide, spokesperson for the Beijing Olympics Organizing Committee, said the stadium would be turned into a multifunctional venue, with sports competitions, exhibitions, concerts and conferences.
The athletics and media villages are to be converted into residential areas, and organizers said most of the units had already been sold.
(SD-Agencies)