Barclay Chalmers: ‘White elephant Games’ must be a past event

THE London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games have been hailed as a tremendous success, with the UK’s investment in sport over the past decade heralding unprecedented medal glory.

Organiser Locog has been praised for its staging of the Games and is on target to meet its ambition of creating the most sustainable, cost-effective event in recent history.

Given the less-than-spotless track record of previous Games, this is no mean feat. Cautionary tales abound of Olympic host cities building spectacular stadia and infrastructure that have fallen into ruin after the Games roadshow rolls out of town.

Greece built or upgraded 36 venues at an estimated cost of more than €12 billion (£9.6bn) when it hosted the Athens Olympics in 2004. Almost all are now derelict after repeated failures to lease them out. Similarly, Beijing has struggled to find tenants or generate revenue from most of the 32 Olympic venues, 12 of which it built for the 2008 Games.

London, however, will dismantle 257,000 out of 745,100 seats in its 34 Olympic venues, equal to the total number removed in the three previous Games combined.

Of these 34 venues, only eight are permanent newbuild structures and will be scaled down, while seven venues, including the 12,000-seat basketball arena that Barr constructed, are temporary. This has to be the way forward for large sporting events.

Olympic gold medallist and US Open tennis champion Andy Murray has called for a new national tennis academy to be built in Scotland.

Clearly, Olympic structures such as the basketball arena, which is large enough to hold between 15 and 20 tennis courts, could be quickly and effectively reconfigured for just such a purpose and situated in Scotland at a fraction of the cost of a newbuild.

Meanwhile, there has been a growing clamour for a football centre of excellence in the east to rival Toryglen in Glasgow and the Aberdeen Sports Village to further develop our national sport.

Such outcomes would benefit Scotland and its future sporting stars. And, if initiatives like this spell the end of the phenomenon of the white elephant Games, then it can truly be judged a triumph for sport – and the taxpayer.

• Barclay Chalmers is managing director of Barr Construction