POSTED: April 5th 2011

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NEIL WILSON: This Aquatics Centre just does not swim with the tide

THE NEIL WILSON COLUMN / An exclusive, authoritative series from Sports Features Communications

LONDON, Apr 05: One day after the International Olympic Committee coordination commission’s latest visit to London’s Olympic Park last week, I did my own site visit and was similarly impressed.

If the stadium on an island is as magnificent inside as it is from the outside it will make a splendid home for the Games and afterwards West Ham United; the velodrome is eye-catching, the athletes village good-looking and spectators will be grateful that every venue in the Park is easy walking distance from the central plaza.

One aspect disappoints – the Aquatics Centre. It was to have been the iconic view as spectators entered the main entrance to the Olympic Park, a design by British-Iranian architect Zaha Hadid that would take the breath away. It doesn’t.

The Aquatics Centre fails on just about every count.  It is four times over-budget from the original Bid Document. It is late on delivery. And, shockingly, it is unkind to the eye in its Games form.

To be blunt, it is pretty ugly, the words used by David Higgins, the former chief executive of the Olympic Delivery Agency to describe it.  Even a more generous coordination commission chairman Denis Oswald said it will be “nicer and more beautiful”  after  the Games.

That is when the tiers of canvas-covered scaffolding that has been added to provide 15,000 of the 17,500 seats for the Olympics are removed from the two long sides of the wave-like roof.

Architect's dream

Then Hadid’s design will be seen in its true glory as an architect’s dream but even then it will not be fit for its post-Games purpose. The mayor of the local borough Robin Wales says it may even need structural change to the roof to be of any value because at present it is too low to allow water slides for a leisure pool and its wooden construction is impractical over a chlorinated pool.

“Foolish” was a word he used.

Even the green credentials of the Olympic Park are damaged by it, according to the Independent Commission for a Sustainable London 2012. It describes it as the least cost-effective of the facilities with the largest carbon footprint.

The wonderful park that is being created to the east of London, the largest to be opened in Europe in more than a century, will at last give Eastenders a playground as delightful as the many under royal patronage up West.

Only the Aquatics Centre fails the test and that is the fault not of its architect but those in the ODA which had the first and last word on its design.

NEIL WILSON reported his first Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. He has since covered another nine summer and nine winter Olympics for various newspapers, including The Independent and the Daily Mail with whom he has worked for the last 19 years as Athletics and Olympic correspondent. He was Britain's Sports Journalist of the Year in 1984 and is the author of seven books

Keywords · Neil Wilson · London 2012 · Aquatics Centre

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