Coe boosts West Ham’s Olympic Stadium hopes 10/09/2010 |
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West Ham’s hopes of moving into the Olympic Stadium after the 2012 Games have received a huge boost after its proposal was supported by London Games chairman Lord Coe.
The club will find out before Christmas whether it has been successful, with Coe revealing a "plethora" of alternatives are vying for the venue.
"I would welcome it," he said of West Ham’s plan. "I was never naive enough to believe that track and field [alone] could support an 80,000-seater stadium and the whole point was not to lumber East London with a stadium that nobody had a use for.
"The Olympic Park Legacy Company are currently talking to Newham Council, talking to West Ham and talking to a plethora of other organisations that have shown interest at one level or another so I know that West Ham are not the only game in town.
"But the owners of West Ham have expressed a real understanding that the community wants to have a footprint here and I have no problems with track and field living alongside football."
West Ham and Newham Council confirmed their joint bid in March this year and will submit their official proposal for the right to lease the stadium on a long-term commercial basis before the deadline at the end of this month.
Should it succeed, the club's owners would have to agree to finance some necessary modifications to the stadium.
"This would not come at no cost to West Ham," added Coe.
"There would be things that they will need to do to reconfigure the stadium such as installing catering facilities.
"It has not been designed as a football stadium in order not to saddle future tenants with things they didn't necessarily want. But the primary objective all along was to make sure we were not going to be left with a white elephant."
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