At long long last a top media voice has been raised against the ill judged criticism of West Ham’s role in the London Stadium negotiations.
The Independent’s Ian Herbert insead wades into Sebastian Coe and Boris Johnson for the mess which has left our great club and it’s board being knocked from pillar to post on a near daily basis.
Instead Herbert points out that “Coe was talking in a very loud way about ‘legacy’ in 2005, when insisting that a 20,000-seat unroofed athletics stadium must form the centrepiece of 2012 London’s Olympic Bid.”
And he adds: They told him at the time that he should bring a football club in from the start for the Olympic Stadium, because you count on the fingers of one hand the number of days athletics needs 20,000 seats.”
He contines: “Under questioning by the Greater London Authority, it was put to him that Tottenham Hotspur may be the stadium’s future occupants.”
Coe’s response was: “I didn’t make a promise to Tottenham Hotspur season ticket holders. Football would not be in the 2012 Bid document, diluting London’s appeal with to IOC. Safe to say it also helped Coe’s bid for the presidency of athletics’ governing body, the IAAF, to make a “pe
The entrance of Boris Johnson who pushed for an additional £300m or so more to be spent bringing some Premier League razzle to the stadium and making it dual use after all.
Herbert says: “Except £300m wasn’t enough. The original canopy only covered two-third of the seats, so £160m would be needed for a new cantilevered roof – the largest cantilevered roof in the world, no less – and to install 21,000 retractable seats, bringing the lower tiers closer to the pitch.
By the time it came to adapting the stadium for the only sport which could consistently fill it, West Ham were the only show in town. And since everyone who has sold a house knows what a lack of willing buyers does to the price, Karren Brady & Co can hardly be blamed for driving as good a deal for their shareholders as they could.
If this really was the “Deal of the century” when can we expect Messi and Suarez. COYI
Have a read of the Charles Sale column in the Daily Mail today about the chronic lack of planning when the Stadium was built – no provision was made for storing the machinery or structure that provides the base for the retractable seating. Decontaminating the Stratford site was not done to a sufficient depth to house the seating infrastructure underground and the price of digging up the foundations to provide a decontiminated space is prohibitive.
As a result erecting and dismantling the seating has to be done manually, requiring huge manpower and additional cost.
Three separate workforces doing eight-hour shifts over 24 hours for 10 days were needed to build the retractable seating for West Ham’s first season at the Stadium.
What a farce – you couldn’t make it up could you?
Sebastian Coe, Tessa Jowell and the rest should be villified for their neglect and mismanagement – a shambles!