The buzzword of “legacy” is difficult to shy away from in any conversation regarding the London 2012 Olympics, mentioned so often that its definition is up for question in any Olympic-focused tête-à-tête.
Yet Sebastian Coe, former long-distance runner, vice-chairman of the IAAF and chairman of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, rammed home last month that the 80,000-seater stadium in Stratford will not only be a central building for the Games in 2012 but also a resource, both practically and aspirationally, to get track and field back to the levels of Coe’s heyday in the early 1980s
Great Britain picked up a haul of 19 gold medals at the Beijing Olympics last year – placing them the fourth nation overall – however runner Christine Ohuruogu’s world-conquering run was the sole gold medal for British track and field. Coe, the double Olympic champion, said that track and field had “fallen behind” in the UK and that the Olympic organisers “need to do everything they can to catch-up with the other sports and regain some of our historic successes, but with a modern team and new management.”
“For us to be able to have a facility that is genuinely a world-class track and field facility and also not to overlook that you are current sitting in an area - that if you threw a blanket of around 2 square miles over - there are any number of schools with a massive amount of athletic talent,” Coe said to a close-knit group of journalists, including BritSport Weekly, and 400-metre medalist Ohuruogu, overlooking the progress of the Olympic construction in East London last month.
“As Chris[tine Ohuruogu] knows there are very few facilities in school and educational terms. I don’t just want to see that becoming a centre for world class track and field…..but I also want it to become a local resource and I want young people to be connected to the Olympic Park and track and field within the stadium.”
The Olympic stadium, which will consist of 25,000 permanent seats and 55,000 temporary seats which will be removed after the conclusion of the Games, is situated on an island site surrounded on three sides by waterways in Stratford, an urban area that has experience governmental regeneration since the late 1990s.
After the Games, the Stadium will host sporting, educational, cultural and community events such as secondary school athletics meets to “add value to the local community for years to come.” The facility will house a secondary school for about 500 students, the National Skills Academy for sports and leisure industries and the English Institute of Sport. The London Development Agency has said revenue from the rest of east London’s Olympic Park would subsidise the stadium in its post-Games form.
“We need to re-energise the sport and do things differently. We also have to recognise that young people are thinking differently about the world and sport, and we need to make sure that track and field which could and should be stronger in schools, returns to schools again. That is where talent gets identified. We have to make sure the schools and the clubs work closer together around the world and that’s where a lot of the coaching expertise is. And yes, we need to do things in a different way.”
The Park’s legacy will without question, according to Coe, be judged by the results of investment in young athletic talent in the London area in the post-Games era.
