London’s £701m Olympic Stadium. So good they built it twice. Or so those responsible hope visitors will be saying once they start streaming back into the arena following a substantial and controversial rebuilding exercise to make it suitable not only for athletics but also for motor racing, cricket, concerts and – most contentiously of all – Premier League football club West Ham United.

On Sunday, thousands of fun runners will cross the finishing line on a track that still bears the London 2012 logo as part of a new event, the Great Newham Run, organised by Brendan Foster’s Nova International. “If you take it as day one of a new chapter in a stadium that has been built and is now going to be an iconic venue, we’re dead excited that the first event is a mass-participation one open to the public,” says Foster.

“I like the idea that the first event back in the Olympic Stadium, which was built by public money and is now there to pass on to the next generation, will be for everyone. I see the future of the Olympic Park as being like the Disneyland of sport.”



Others remain to be convinced. The exterior of the stadium has become part of the Stratford landscape amid an ever-shifting patchwork of construction work on the Olympic Park that is starting to coalesce into a recognisable whole. Yet the huge cost and controversy over the public funds used to pay for it hang over the stadium like a cloud.

Going through the new turnstiles and emerging on to the track still cannot help but set off an internal soundtrack of Caliban’s Dream (the Underworld song that accompanied the lighting of the cauldron) and memories of Super Saturday and Usain Bolt.

The wheelchair racer Hannah Cockroft was one of those who won memorable gold medals in the stadium and will be back for the Anniversary Games next weekend which, as Bolt and Mo Farah fly in to compete, will provide an early stern test of the public appetite for athletics at the stadium. “Even though it’s different, you come in and feel comfortable. It’s a lovely track and a beautiful stadium. I was worried about coming back,” Cockroft says. “It looks different but just as nice, a bit cosier. You had to leave the track here. London 2012 was so big for Britain, why take it away? It’s a beautiful stadium with so many memories.”

It will host five Rugby World Cup matches in the autumn on the new Desso pitch. Then, this time next year, after closing again for some final touching up, bubbles will begin floating around the Olympic Stadium as West Ham try to make the 54,000-seat arena feel like home after 111 years at the Boleyn Ground at Upton Park.

The £272m conversion (not far off the £280m the stadium was originally slated to cost) is all but complete and the effect is at once impressive and disconcerting. Nothing has changed and yet hardly anything remains the same. The triangular floodlights have been removed and apparently inverted (they are in fact new structures, though the light fittings have been retained). The only part of the stadium that remains is that which was supposed to be temporary (the upper tier), while the section that was to be permanent has been replaced (the bottom tier, swapped for new retractable seats).



Around the perimeter, the number of toilets has doubled and a covered concourse introduced to house catering outlets. A new tier of corporate hospitality, essential to West Ham’s bottom line, has appeared along one side. It will still feel light and airy to its admirers and insubstantial to its critics.

To all intents and purposes, it has been completely rebuilt as part of a huge, expensive engineering puzzle. Even elements that appear to have been retained, such as the distinctive white struts that form the exoskeleton, had to be replaced to support a huge new cantilevered roof that is the biggest of its kind in Europe. Vaulting over the existing structure and constructed using techniques usually employed to build North Sea oil rigs, it hovers above the upper tier and will cover all of the 21,000 West Ham fans in the lower one once the seats are rolled forward in football (or rugby) mode.

The hope is that it will also help boost the acoustics, retaining an atmosphere that would otherwise drift off into the E20 air in the expansive bowl. The London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) desperately hopes that flinging open the doors to the stadium again, at least temporarily, will help justify its arguments for spending so much public money on making it a multipurpose stadium.

The history is now well rehearsed. With the Picketts Lock fiasco and the spiralling cost of Wembley still fresh in the mind, and no football club willing to commit at that stage, the Olympic board took the fateful decision to get on and build the stadium in 2007, effectively parking questions over its legacy for later. An unsatisfactory halfway house became the default position, allowing the stadium to be either “demounted” to become an uninspiring 25,000-seat windswept bowl with no roof or converted into a permanent stadium at great expense.

After the triumph of the Games and following a tortuous and controversial process that ended in acrimonious legal paralysis, a deal was eventually agreed with West Ham to be the main anchor tenant during the winter. UK Athletics also get guaranteed use in the summer, while Newham council (which has put in a £40m loan) has access at certain times. The stadium operators, Vinci, will try to fill the gaps with all manner of other sports and events.

Neale Coleman, deputy chairman of the LLDC, has led work on the Olympics at the Greater London Authority since 2000. He is blunt about why the final bill is so high. “The big decision was to go for full retractable seats. You either do it properly or you don’t do it at all. People underestimate the extent to which the Olympic Stadium was temporary,” argues Coleman of a bill that swelled to more than £700m after the cost of the roof soared.

“We had to do all the strengthening to the structure to hold up the new roof and virtually an entire new building around the thing to put in all the things you need [for a permanent stadium].”

He says the idea that a multipurpose stadium should have been built in the beginning is revisionist “rubbish” given the lack of interest then from West Ham, public and political pressure to keep costs down and the urgent need to start building. Afterwards, he says, the choice was stark. “The real choice was either to demount the whole thing, which you could have done with a 25,000 plan which would have been pretty unsatisfactory. Or you could have knocked the whole thing down,” he says.

“Or you could have tried to keep it up a bit like it was, but you couldn’t have done football with it. It would have been a summer stadium and you’d have said it was crap. And it would have been.”

So the LLDC has chosen the “full fat” route, bringing forth a fresh wave of criticism from those who feel West Ham have effectively been gifted a new stadium paid for with public money. The club will pay just £15m towards the £272m conversion costs and annual rent of around £2.5m. In return, West Ham argue, they give the stadium a sustainable future.

The largest chunk of funding for the transformation comes from a one-off settlement of £148.8m from the exchequer in 2010. On top of that Newham council has provided £40m, West Ham £15m, almost £40m comes from the original £9.3bn budget for the Olympics, and a further £25m from the government. UK Athletics has invested £1m and the London Marathon Charitable Trust has provided £3.5m.“I think it’s a pretty good deal,” says Coleman. “Let’s be honest, if you’re negotiating with one party you’re negotiating with one party. But we did negotiate very hard and very long. We had to satisfy everyone of the market rent. We take the lion’s share of the food and beverage, we take the naming rights. West Ham will pay us a load of money over the term of the lease, we will make a load of money over the term of the lease. We probably won’t ever recover all the public sector investment but, equally, we get a lot of other benefits.”

He points to all the other Olympic stadiums that have struggled to find a legacy use from Sydney to Athens, Barcelona to Beijing to argue they are doing pretty well in comparison. On Friday, Japan’s prime minister scrapped pans for Zaha Hadid’s ambitious $2bn design for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and vowed to go back to the drawing board amid growing public outrage at the cost.

“It does cost what it costs. It’s not far off Wembley. But it is a bit different in that we’ve done it twice,” says Coleman. “If you hold the Olympics, you have to build an 80,000-seat track-and-field stadium that no one will want. So you either have it as the national stadium or you need an anchor.”

The calculated gamble taken by West Ham’s co-owners David Gold and David Sullivan and sealed by vice- chair Karren Brady (in return for a rumoured healthy bonus) is that despite no longer owning their own ground they will vault into a different financial league. From a slick sales office in Stratford’s Westfield shopping centre (which would have been built with or without the Olympics but adds to the overall feeling of an area undergoing a bewildering makeover) West Ham are already close to selling out the hospitality suites that are all but complete above the halfway line.

The comfy chairs Gold and Sullivan will take in their new domain are also in place, although the only splashes of claret are above the various exits. It is likely there will be some sort of West Ham logo on the seats and further concessions to the Hammers’ colour scheme.

Coleman concedes that making the stadium feel like home for the club while maintaining the feel of a multiuse arena paid for and available to all will be a challenge. “I know we’re having the Bobby Moore statue and we’re talking to them about colours and seats and things like that,” he says. “Everybody recognises there’s a balance to be struck. We can manage that. There’s lights, temporary overlay.”

London 2012 gold medallist Hannah Cockroft says the new Olympic Stadium ‘looks different but just as nice, a bit cosier’. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer

There are still many other unknowns. One of the greatest is just how suitable the Olympic Stadium will be as a football ground, even after all the money spent on retractable seats and the new roof. Taking in the view from the exact spot where the front row of fans will sit it is clear that this will still feel like a big, expansive European-style stadium rather than the tight grounds British fans are used to.

Stadium designers elsewhere, from the new White Hart Lane to the redeveloped Anfield, are in contrast trying to mimic the imposing kops and tightly packed atmosphere of days gone by. On one side of West Ham’s new home there will be large flat platforms behind the seats once they are rolled over the track. Behind the goals, there are solutions to fill in the gaps, but it will still look unlike any other football ground in the country. To state the obvious, much will depend on results – if West Ham are winning and the place is buzzing, fans will take to it.

“We’re quite pleased with the events this summer because they really demonstrate it’s not just West Ham’s stadium. We will want to do events not just during the summer but during the season as well,” says Coleman. “We know when the international breaks are, we know when we can do things. West Ham will want a good pitch and professional management. We want that too, we want them to be very successful. But we also want to sweat it as much as possible.”

He concedes there will be more competition than ever before given Tottenham Hotspur’s new stadium (which will host at least two NFL matches a year from 2018), Wembley, Twickenham, the Emirates and a rebuilt Stamford Bridge. But he believes that Vinci will be successful in attracting a range of events, pointing to a capacity of more than 100,000 for concerts and the large bowl that makes motor racing a possibility.

Yet down in the detail of the deal there are other lingering concerns. The Guardian revealed earlier this year that by not seeking prior approval from the European Commission, the LLDC had left itself open to a potential decade of legal challenges over whether the deal with West Ham constituted state aid.

Coleman, nursing a coffee in the shadow of one element of the Olympic Park that has not yet lived up to expectations in terms of visitor numbers (the Orbit, in which he hopes to boost interest by installing a giant slide), says he is as sure as he can be that there was no state aid and says the EC is satisfied. Asked why there was no prior approval sought in order to provide certainty, he says: “The real reason for that is quite straightforward: we needed to sign a deal and we didn’t want to wait 18 months while people in Europe pored over it. We had to get on with doing this.”

None of which is liable to stop rival groups of fans concerned about the effect on their own clubs and other interested parties who believe that West Ham have unfairly benefited from public funding lodging new complaints with the EC. Meanwhile, campaigners will keep pushing for more transparency; LLDC and West Ham will keep citing commercial confidentiality.

There are two debates. One is over whether, with more foresight and better planning, an awful lot of money and heartache could have been saved. As long ago as 2003, plans existed for a multiuse stadium that could have avoided later problems. The other is whether, having been dealt the hand they held, the LLDC could have done anything different post Games. Coleman, tightly bound up in the Olympic project from the start, unsurprisingly insists it got the big calls right. Elsewhere on the manicured Park, from the Tumbling Bay adventure playground to the Velodrome, it can still too often feel more like a slightly artificial oasis of expensive lattes and corporate track cycling events than a living, breathing part of the boroughs it has landed in.

Yet the numbers are impressive: more than 5m visitors to date, more than 800,000 swimmers in the Aquatics Centre and a general feeling that the Park is starting to gain a post-Games identity.

Likewise on the opposite side, the trick will be to mesh the new Here East technology park – which already houses BT Sport – into Hackney, which is facing its own gentrification challenges.

At the behest of London mayor Boris Johnson, the last couple of years have seen a major rebalancing of priorities. There will be less housing on the Park and instead a focus on making it a destination that can attract jobs and visitors and fuel wider regeneration.

As such, a new UCL campus, a new V&A museum, the Smithsonian and Loughborough University will all move in. At the entrance to the Park, two new office blocks will house some 25,000 workers. There will still be five neighbourhoods of new housing.

Coleman says promises on affordable housing have been kept and insists it won’t become an oasis of privilege in a wider desert of deprivation but is dragging up the area around it.

Like those who feel that investing £9bn in an Olympic Games was never the most effective way of inspiring a nation to become more active, there are many who still argue that nor was it the best driver of regeneration.

“It’s an enormous change. Is it a change for the better? I think so. But it’s not straightforward,” admits Coleman.

He concedes more could be done on the park to evoke memories of 2012 and to recognise its sporting heritage – the bell that Bradley Wiggins chimed at Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony will be restored to pride of place in the stadium before it fully reopens next year.

Whether it will ring in a glorious new era for a stadium that has already witnessed its share of drama and controversy in its short life or become the backdrop for a bitter battle over its legacy and cost, only time will tell. One thing is clear: nostalgia alone will not pay the bills and its post-Games life starts here.