Warner Backs West Ham 2012 Bid
UK Athletics chairman Ed Warner has backed Premier League club West Ham’s proposal to use the 2012 Olympic Stadium, stating that the plans were ‘very credible’.
The £537m site is set to be reduced from 80,000 seats to 25,000 after 2012, with athletics as its primary use.
However West Ham owners David Sullivan and David Gold are behind controversial plans to move the club to Stratford.
The plans now seem to have won the approval of UKA chief Warner however: ‘West Ham has put their hat in the ring. It’s a very credible proposal and one worth looking at. It would work as a football stadium.
‘They haven’t formerly submitted their letter yet, but they are clearly very interested and working hard. I’ve spent a lot of time with them I think that it is going to be a very credible proposal and certainly one we could work with, there may well be others.’
West Ham has held talks with the local Newham Council over a joint bid to occupy the stadium, with a proposed 50,000-capacity for football matches, after the 2012 Games.
But several high-profile figures, including Olympic and world heptathlon bronze medallist Kelly Sotherton, Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell and ex-London mayor Ken Livingstone have questioned switching its use from athletics to football.
American sports and entertainment company AEG, the owners of the O2 Arena, is just one of more than 100 parties to have expressed an interest in assuming control of the venue.
Potential bidders have until 17th May to register their interest with a final shortlist of about 30 to be announced in March 2011.
Warner has previously been outspoken over Gold’s suggestion that a separate, much smaller venue should be built to house future athletics events, allowing West Ham to lease the Olympic Stadium.
But he now believes reducing capacity and reconfiguring seating at the 2012 arena would make it viable for both athletics and football to exist together.
‘Those people who said football won’t work in the Olympic Stadium haven’t stood in the middle of the Olympics Stadium, which I’ve done a number of times.
‘If you stand in there you realise for an 80,000 stadium it is actually very compact and you could certainly reduce the capacity without cutting the infrastructure of the stadium.
‘I think it will feel great as a football stadium and I speak as a football fan as well the chairman of UK Athletics. I think you’d find West Ham would cover the track in the winter season so it wouldn’t look like you had a track between you and the pitch.
‘I think it works very well. You have to stand there and see it to believe it. I think West Ham has stood there, thought about it and really think it would work for them.’
