The post-Games legacies of the last five Olympic Stadiums

Historically, the centerpiece of a host city’s Summer Games has always been the designated Olympic Stadium. Like the best player on a title contender, Olympic Stadium is the face of the franchise and all of the other venues serve as role players, if not standout stars in their own right. With honor of hosting the opening and closing ceremonies as well as the athletics/track & field competitions, the Stadium acts as a symbol of the host nation’s grander aspirations to the whole world.

Yet, with the boldest of designs and sweetest of bells and whistles, these stadiums have also reflected a flashpoint in the convergence of sporting passions, civic pride and fiscal responsibility. More often than not, the designated Olympic Stadium is an overpriced and underutilized white elephant of sorts for the city where it was built. The selected main stadium for Rio – the already iconic Maracanã Stadium which was opened in 1950 – is home to Brazil’s national soccer teams as well as two Serie A clubs, keeping the grounds in frequent use. However, the last five Olympic Stadiums have not exactly been gifts from the sports gods thanks to a mix of greed, cost overruns and, in the case of one host, economic ruin.

1996: Atlanta

When Centennial Olympic Stadium was being built, it was constructed with a permanent tenant in mind, the Atlanta Braves. Shortly after the Games ended, the Braves took over the lease and the stadium was pared down from 85,000 for track and field to 45,000 for baseball. Renamed Turner Field after media magnate and team owner Ted Turner, the Braves would spend much of the next two decades there, playing in twelve postseasons, capturing nine NL East titles, one National League pennant and two Wild Card berths.

Surprisingly in November 2013, the franchise announced that it would be moving to new grounds – SunTrust Park – in suburban Cobb County for the 2017 season, twenty years after leaving Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium for Turner Field. That decision has been nothing short of controversial, from the team’s reasoning to leave downtown Atlanta to the financing of the new field’s construction. The Ted, meanwhile will be sold to Georgia State University, which plans to turn it into a mixed-use development of student housing, retail and a 30,000-seat football stadium for the Panthers.

2000: Sydney

While built for the 2000 Summer Games, Stadium Australia actually opened in 1999, hosting multiple sports and entertainment events before opening its doors for the Olympics. With a temporary capacity for 110,000, Sydney Olympic Stadium holds several distinctions for attendance, including hosting the most spectators for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies as well as the largest athletics/track & field audience in history.

After the “Millennium Games”, the stadium was scaled down to a shade under 83,000 seats for concerts, rugby, Australian Rules Football, motorcycle speedway and soccer/football. Five different National Rugby League teams call what’s formally known as ANZ Stadium home and the league’s Grand Final has taken place there every year since 2003. The signature events at ANZ are New South Wales’ home games for the State of Origin, an annual best-of-three series against Queensland which is considered the top rugby competition on the planet.

One can argue that when it came to the next phase of the post-Olympics use of their stadium, Sydney fared better than every other prior Olympic host.

2004: Athens

While the Olympic Games have always stirred up controversy because of how stadium construction would sap up public funds, perhaps no edition had brought the issue to the forefront as when the Games returned to their spiritual home of Athens.

The Olympic Stadium of Athens “Spyros Louis” was actually built many years prior, completed in 1982 after three years of construction. Named after the first modern Olympics marathon winner, it hosted many multinational tournaments prior to the city being awarded the 28th Olympiad in 1997. The stadium underwent significant renovations, including the addition of a roof for those Summer Games. Yet, construction of all venues, including renovations for Spyros Louis, was behind schedule and not completed until two months before the start of the Games.

Olympic Stadium has been home to AEK Athens, one of Greece’s larger soccer clubs, since 2003, yet the team will be leaving for a smaller facility in 2017. Meanwhile, many of the remaining venues have been left unused in the 12 years since they opened their doors to the world thanks to a combination of mismanagement and the global financial crisis of the late 2000s. It seemed as if Greece’s eyes were larger than its appetite at the time as the mad dash to essentially build a new Athens through the Olympics exacerbated the country’s economic troubles.

2008: Beijing

Though China has the largest population in the world with close to 1.4 billion people, the 29th Olympiad was billed as a “coming out party” for a country that for decades had walled itself away from Western-style capitalism. Probably more than the host nation’s own athletes (who took home 51 gold medals), Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt or the USA men’s hoops “Redeem Team,”  the Bird’s Nest may have been the biggest star of the Olympiad thanks to the most elaborate opening and closing ceremonies in recent memory. The concept of Beijing National Stadium was to hide the structural underpinnings of a retractable roof, but with such an artistic, if not irregular, skeleton compared to past and future venues, the roof was scraped so that the nest look would stand out even more.

(It should be noted that Ai Weiwei, the designer of the Bird’s Nest, has disassociated himself from the stadium because of strong anti-Olympics sentiments and criticism of his country.)

These days, with no regular tenant to use the building, Beijing National Stadium is nothing more than a mere tourist attraction, albeit a somewhat profitable one despite needing $11 million in annual maintenance. Save for one-off actual sports events, the Bird’s Nest has been each of the following, at times, simultaneously: the world’s largest art museum, a Segway race track, a shopping mall, a snow theme park. However, Beijing National Stadium will make history in the 2022 Winter Olympics as the first facility to host opening and closing ceremonies in a Summer and Winter Olympiad. So there’s that.

2012: London

In becoming the first city to host the Games three times (1908, 1948), there was great concern with citizens in The Big Smoke over cost overruns similar to Beijing and unused buildings thanks to the legacy left behind from Athens. Yet, while this one would have a shelf life past the summer of 2012, it certainly didn’t avoid rising costs as the facility leapt from the pre-Olympics £280 estimate to £701 million (about $902 million US) after construction and post-Olympics transformation. An already smaller centerpiece that was more comparable to Atlanta than the previous three hosts, London’s Olympic Stadium hosted 80,000 people before the removal of 25,000 seats for its future tenant.

Two separate contentious battles for leasing rights began in 2010, two years before the Olympics took place. Premier League club West Ham United came out the victor in both, but not without heaps of controversy regarding funding and territorial rights with Premier League rival Tottenham Hotspur and League 2 club Leyton Orient F.C. Yesterday, in their first match as the primary tenant of what’s known as London Stadium, the Hammers defeated Slovenian club NK Domzale to clinch a berth in the Europa League playoffs.