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Architectural wonder or a potential eyesore?

By Daniel Garst (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-08-02 14:05

Like most people in and outside China, I believe the National Stadium, or Bird's Nest, is a truly stunning structure. It is unique among the world's major sports venues. And I count the day spent viewing track and field events during the 2008 Olympic Games as one of my most memorable China experiences.

But that was then, what about now and the future?

Recent history shows that big Olympic sporting venues tend to lead troubled post-Olympic lives.

The Greek Olympic Stadium has fared the worst, becoming a squalid encampment for Athens' homeless during the recent Greek economic meltdown. And after the 2000 games, Sydney's 80,000-seat Stadium Australia lost money, failing to attract enough rock concerts and football matches. The owners had to be bailed out with a government loan and sold the facility at a loss.

The people managing the Bird's Nest are confident that it can avoid these problems, noting that the only other large stadium in the capital is the clunky, 1959-vintage Workers' Stadium.

Nevertheless, the Bird's Nest has so far lured just a few big-time athletic events following the 2008 Olympics. These include last fall's "Race of Champions" and, more recently, matches pitting Beijing Guoan against the Barcelona and Birmingham City football teams.

However, the income from these periodic sporting blockbusters is well below the nearly $10 million needed annually just to maintain the Bird's Nest; interest charges amount to another $9 million a year.

In a major blow to the stadium's management, the Beijing Guoan Soccer team declined an offer to make the Bird's Nest their new home field, citing the embarrassment of playing in a nearly empty stadium. They typically attract 10-11,000 spectators; the Bird's Nest, even after being recently downsized, still seats 81,000 people.

The stadium has also not been a magnet for major performing arts event. It has hosted just two such spectacles, a Jackie Chan concert and Zhang Yimou's adaptation of Turandot. The latter performance was a total disaster: critics argued that the stadium's dreadful acoustics make it a terrible place to hold such events.

In addition to bad acoustics, the Bird's Nest lacks a retractable roof, making it unusable for outdoor live performances from November through March, when the weather here is bitterly cold. For all these reasons, the former Olympic Basketball arena in Wukesong, which hosted last fall's Avril Lavigne concert, is likely to see much greater use as a performing arts venue.

Thus most of the Bird's Nest current revenue has come from tourists, who pay 50 yuan to view a big empty stadium. So far, these ticket sales have kept the Bird's Nest profitable, but as memories of the 2008 Olympics fade, fewer tourists will want to see this high-priced attraction.

Indeed, visits plunged from 80,000 a day in October to 15,000 a day in November. Foreign tourists also appear to have lost interest in the Bird's Nest. For example, a British colleague at work informed me that when his son visited Beijing earlier this summer, he had no desire to see the stadium.

None of this bodes well for the future of the Bird's Nest. Moreover, as the stadium ages, its already sky-high maintenance costs will

surely rise. In fact, in some parts of the stadium, the paint has already started peeling.

I'm sure that the upcoming London Olympics will lack the grandeur of the 2008 Beijing Games. The Bird's Nest, of course, was a key element in this spectacle. But London has at least got it right with respect to seating capacity in Olympic stadium design.

The new facility being built in East London has removable upper tiers, which will reduce its post-Olympic seating capacity to a manageable 50,000 spectators. Indeed, the Premiership team West Ham is already very keen to take over the facility after the 2012 games.

This new stadium shows that London has learned from the recent bitter post-Olympic experiences of other countries.

And the British have provided a model for how to build mega sports venues for big-time international sporting events that are economically viable over the long haul.

Beijing would do well to follow this model the next time it hosts a major international sports event.

For China Daily