Olympic Stadium not up to Premier League standards

LONDON (AP) — London's Olympic Stadium is not up to Premier League standards and the pitch will have to be ripped up after the games and replaced using public funds to enable a football club to be able to use the venue, according to officials.

The 486 million-pound ($767 million) troubled centerpiece of the Olympic Park has been built without the under-soil heating required in England to stage top football matches.

East London football club West Ham would have footed the bill of up to 2 million pounds ($3 million) to install a new pitch with under-soil heating, but its long-term tenancy agreement was ripped up last year due to legal challenges.

Instead, the Olympic Park Legacy Company has revealed to The Associated Press that it will have to pay for the pitch changes because the stadium will remain in public ownership and be rented out to various companies after the games.

"The Olympic Stadium is a white elephant and they now have to spend money to stop it being a white elephant," London Assembly member Andrew Boff told The AP on Tuesday.

Renting the stadium to a football club is vital to ensuring the stadium's long-term viability despite it originally being designed to primarily stage athletics events.

"The problem here is the stadium was never designed for football," said Boff, who sits on a committee that scrutinizes the Olympic project. "We've seen the results of really bad planning; really shockingly, awful decisions made during the planning stage before the OPLC was around. They have been handed a real mess to sort out."

The need for under-soil heating was highlighted when a Six Nations rugby match between France and Ireland was called off earlier this month because the Stade de France in Paris lacked such a facility.

Premier League rules state that a club must have "an under-soil heating system or some adequate system of pitch protection to the reasonable satisfaction of the board" to stage matches.

A new pitch with under-soil heating is set to cost up to 2 million pounds, although the OPLC would not release figures and the stadium's architects declined to comment.

"All those extra additional costs — including extending the roof to cover more of the seats, additional VIP lounges that are essential for the stadium — will now come down to the taxpayer rather than the tenant," Boff said.

West Ham, which was relegated from the Premier League last season, was supposed to pay for the stadium's transformation after being selected as the preferred long-term tenant of the stadium.

But the British government scrapped that deal in October amid a legal paralysis created by challenges to the bidding process. Tottenham was one of the challengers, failing in an attempt to rip down the stadium and build a new one without a running track.

About 35 million pounds ($55 million) has already been earmarked under the Olympic budget to downsize the stadium from an 80,000 to a 60,000-seat facility after the games.

One certainty is that the running track will remain in the stadium regardless of the outcome, with London awarded the 2017 world athletics championships.

"It is a mess, the stadium, because it's a stadium designed with an athletics legacy that they are trying to shoehorn football into," Boff said. "I would not think a Premier League team would want anything other than a stadium designed for football. A Premier League team cannot survive in the Olympics Stadium as it is. They decided too late to invite bids from football clubs.

"They are trying to cobble together a legacy when they should have planned it years ago."

Sixteen companies have expressed an interest in bidding for the use of the stadium after the Olympics, including West Ham, and have until March 23 to submit formal bids. The winning bid will be announced in May but the stadium won't be ready until 2014.