What happens to Olympic stadiums after the Olympic games end?

Tokyo Olympic will be kicking off just within a month’s time. For two weeks, the eyes of the world will be trained on Tokyo.

When the International Olympic Committee selects a host for the upcoming Olympic games, it puts a lot of pressure on the chosen city. With this comes the need for the best venues to host sporting events and impress the world.

But what happens to these Olympic venues after the athletes are done, the games conclude and the last spectators go home?

“Legacy”. This simple word has become definitional for the International Olympic Committee over recent years.

To justify the huge expenditure that major sporting championships represent, Games organizers have to demonstrate value for money long after the final medal ceremony.

Physical infrastructure plays a big part in the legacy equation. What to do with all those stadia, arenas, dining halls, velodromes and so on?

The Olympics represent a significant economic investment and, therefore, economic risk — by the host cities. Some are actually repurposed for other uses.

London has learned the hard way. The cost of converting the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park into a home ground for Premier League football club West Ham United has topped £700m — making it more expensive per spectator than refitting Wembley stadium.

Reused Olympic venues

a) Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park

This $75 million park was a focal point of the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. It was used as a gathering place for Olympic fans during the games. After the Olympics ended, the park was shut down and renovated for public use. Used to host community events, it now serves as a public park and a monument to the games held here.

b) Barcelona’s beachfront

For all the horror stories of countries falling into financial despair after hosting the Olympics, Barcelona’s 1992 Summer Olympics is an example of how to do it right. Using sand from Egypt, the country created an artificial beachfront for the games, making it one of the hottest tourist destinations in Europe.

While those three serve as examples of how to manage a venue post-Olympics, there are other examples of how not to do it. Many Olympic venues now sit abandoned.

Rio Aquatic Center

In the leadup to the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics, city organizers made plans to use their many venues following the games. In at least one case, it didn’t come to fruition. The Aquatic Center built to host the swimming events is now closed.

If there’s a single factor on which the legacy question rides, it is the extent to which Games’ venues are integrated into a city’s existing infrastructure.

Today, the thinking has turned full circle: the more central, the better. Barcelona, which used the 1992 Olympics to regenerate downtown industrial areas of the city, provides a stellar example. Sydney less so: the city’s Olympic Park lies 16km from the central business district. Tokyo is taking Barcelona’s lead and using the Olympics to hopefully regenerate its downtown waterfront district.

So, Is it really worth the expense to host the Olympic games?

An increasing number of people around the world are beginning to question the wisdom of spending billions on building the multitude of large venues required for the Olympic Games. Many are of the opinion that it is not worth it for the host country to undergo such expense for venues that may have limited or no use in the future.

The more economical choice, though, is to construct temporary structures. The most successful re-purposing has been the turning of the Olympic Villages into housing complexes. The best choice is to decide what infrastructure the host city needs and temporarily retrofit that to use for the games.

Olympic parks were mostly built on empty lands just outside the host cities and that made them inconvenient to be reused for everyday city life.

Barcelona was able to successfully regenerate its beach culture and downtown industrial areas after using them as venues for the 1992 Summer Olympics. Since then, the trend has been to locate venues in the centre of the host city, creating an infrastructure that can be easily reused for business and other activities.

When it comes to the cost of the Olympic Games, in addition to the sports infrastructure, the host city must also spend money on building or renovating public transportation, roads, railways, airports, hospitals, security, power grid, and other things.

Without hosting the Olympics, it may not have been possible to allocate the budget needed for the building all the infrastructure at the same time. This expenditure can be taken as an investment that helps the host city in the long term.

Whatever decision is made, it is important to make it very carefully made and long before even thinking of hosting the Olympics.

-By RAMAN KOSTA