Finishing touches and evolution

Once stadia are built, their development needs to continue in order to ensure long term usage. Some are adjusted, some rebuilt, and a few are abandoned or lost forever. All the while, in other cities, there are those looking to learn from the past successes and mistakes to give birth to the next generation of super stadia and to become major sporting hubs.

London will certainly not give up it’s status at the top of the sporting tree without a fight. It’s current Premier League football clubs are all considering or well on the way towards following Arsenal’s lead in moving up the property ladder. Lord’s continues to explore ways of ensuring the 201 year-old spiritual home of cricket retains its heritage whilst enhancing its facilities in line with the latest spectator experience expectations. The jewel of East London, the Olympic Park, continues its evolution to cement its place as the blueprint for Olympic legacy.

In addition to new stadia, London is racking up an impressive CV as a host of major events; something that shows no sign of slowing in the coming years. To build on London 2012, UK Sport embarked on an ambitious programme to host 70 major events between 2013 and 2019. Many of these world and european events are based in the capital, including track cycling, aquatics, hockey and the 2017 World Athletics Championships.

In addition, this year’s Rugby World Cup, with three of 13 venues in London, will be followed by the Cricket World Cup in 2019. Wembley is also booked in for the semi-finals and final of Euro 2020, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see UEFA return in the near future for London’s third Champions League final.

Along with falling leaves, autumn brings the razzmatazz of the NFL. The visit of this major outdoor spectacle has quickly become a hugely popular part of the sporting calendar, with Wembley and it’s environs transformed into a little piece of America for a what is becoming a growing number of weekends.

The talk of an NFL franchise in London is unlikely to subside whilst Wembley continues to sell out every game. I’m not entirely against the idea of Spurs sharing a new home with the London Cockerels/Royals, or whatever the promoters deem an appropriate name. Sure, the pitch may cut up a little for a few weeks in the autumn, but once the conference championships are over in mid-January, the pitch would be exclusively used for real football. The money generated would help with the build and local infrastructure, maybe even allowing two different sliding pitches, and help promote the area and the football club. However, Daniel Levy’s recent comments suggest this will not happen in N17. I suspect the lure of all this cash will be too much for the FA to ignore when the time comes.

The great travelling circus of money that is F1, keeps coming back to London with suggestions of street circuits passing historic landmarks and even the idea of driving through the Olympic Stadium, where 60,000 petrol heads will have a chance to see their heroes zooming through in just a few seconds each lap. I guess this could become as iconic as Monaco’s tunnel section. It is the iconography as much as the financial power of this city that means the draw of London remains undeniably strong.

The rest of the world wants to catch up and take their pieces of the sporting pie. London may not keep it’s crown for long, but few other places will be able to make so much of their architectural or sporting heritage.

Paris, who were close to hosting the 2012 Olympics, keep coming back for this ultimate prize. This would bring more new venues to this strikingly beautiful city but this is a one football club town, with no cricket and a single multi-use national venue for rugby, football and athletics. Things will change with the magnificent new national rugby stadium, but there is probably no real need for a new Olympic stadium as this is what the Stade de France was designed for.

Elsewhere, Singapore is making great strides in creating a large sports hub, Melbourne would appear to be sizing itself up for another shot at the Olympics and all across the United States, impossibly huge new stadia are popping up; again with no single hub city taking the lead, which was never really likely in a nation of 50 semi-autonomous states.

The big players in this game are now those who have more money than they know what to do with, along with a strong desire to promote themselves to the wider world.

Initially, the cities of the United Arab Emirates started with cricket by creating ambitiously large stadia that have only been utilised because of security problems in India and Pakistan. Now Dubai is the headquarters of cricket’s governing body, the ICC. Abu Dhabi has invested heavily in European football clubs and is a sparkling stop on the F1 calendar. However, their near neighbours in Qatar have taken the baton and are running away with it. Having already hosted the Asian Games in Doha in 2006, their will and financial clout have seen them bankroll several European football teams and, somewhat controversially, win the rights for the 2022 World Cup. The idea of air-conditioned stadia may be fanciful and less than ecological, but I have to admire their insistence that anything is possible and their desire to push the boundaries of stadium design. They’ve also secured the World Athletics Championships, which is just another precursor to an Olympic bid. They may not have the domestic sporting structure to sustain these new stadia, but Doha could become the ‘go to’ sports hub outside of their roasting summer.

After Qatar, albeit with less reliable weather, the Azerbaijan capital of Baku and the main cities of Kazakstan are pushing hard to take their place at the top table of international sporting centres.

I’m sure I will find my way to these other hubs in time, but first I have a city on my doorstep to continue to explore. In addition to the venues identified in these posts, I must take a look at some of the leeser known gems identified in Simon Inglis’s Played in London, which I’ll be using as my guide book.

As well as all that sport, London is home to the myriad of theatres of the west end and a has a number of widely recognised event spaces, including music venues playing to several hundred people and huge festival spaces, from the established in Finsbury Park to the new at the Olympic Park’s South Lawn and the most widely used, Hyde Park.

Try as they might, I’m not sure anywhere will ever compete with all that London has to offer!