The Olympic Park feels alive for the World Championships, but most of the time this awe-inspiring stadium is an expensive-to-maintain tourist attraction

“Wonderfulness is right before you. Bird’s Nest is always with you,” proclaims a sign at the entrance to the still magnificent 2008 Olympic Stadium.

Things have been less than wonderful for the sport of athletics in recent months, with the shadow of doping and corruption ever present. And while the Bird’s Nest is always with us, there hasn’t been much actually inside it in the past seven years. If London’s Olympic Stadium is an (expensive) answer to an architectural exam question on the most money it is possible to spend on a sporting arena while still appearing to be made of Meccano, the Bird’s Nest is its polar opposite.

It remains a great, hulking, awe-inspiring beast of a stadium that may be among the last of its kind as host countries and organisers pare back their plans in the face of public disquiet over the costs involved. In Tokyo, the prime minister has just torn up plans for a lavish Zaha Hadid-designed stadium for the 2020 Olympics amid concerns over cost.

Since the closing ceremony of the 2008 Games, the Bird’s Nest has effectively become a giant tourist attraction costing $11m a year to maintain. “After China hosted the Olympics, the Bird’s Nest stadium has become a new landmark for Beijing,” says the executive vice-secretary general of the local organising committee, Chen Jie. “We have had over 300 different events – football, concerts, press conferences. Also some events participated by the public.”

If that seems like a lot of money for a giant museum and a few press conferences, the Chinese authorities don’t seem to care. There has been the odd pop concert, the Italian Super Cup, a winter theme park, Formula E motor racing and various pre-season friendlies but despite those odds and sods it stands as an empty monument to China’s magnificence.

It has become a regular stop on domestic tourist itineraries and the Olympic Park feels alive and well-tended.

Organisers had claimed even morning sessions were 90% sold out. It was nowhere near as full as that as Jessica Ennis-Hill and Katarina Johnson-Thompson lined up for the hurdles but the crowd was more than respectable. The top tier was closed off, limiting capacity to 50,000, and organisers have cannily placed giant video screens and an arty construction that appears to bring the lattice work that clads the stadium inside over the empty seats.

The so-called “IAAF Family” (as they are officially called on their lanyards) are almost as dysfunctional as their Fifa brethren. It will take more than the preposterous IAAF hymn and the raising of the IAAF flag to ward off the problems faced by its new president, Sebastian Coe. Lamine Diack, the outgoing president, made reference to values of “honesty, integrity and fair play” in his speech. Easy to say, harder to enact.

The panjandrums of international sport will be back here for the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in 2022 and, as ever, it is impossible not to feel that Fifa, the International Olympic Committee and the IAAF feel a little more at home in countries with a less than democratic political system.

Like a junior Olympics or World Cup, organisers have created a mini bubble around the Bird’s Nest where Twitter and Google are readily available and western hotels dispense Starbucks. Yet just a fortnight ago Amnesty International warned of an “unprecedented crackdown on freedom of expression” in the country, with more than 200 human rights lawyers and activists rounded up in recent weeks.

The Bird’s Nest was once memorably described by Marina Hyde as “the Death Star with a superior percussion section” following that awe-inspiring 2008 opening ceremony – CGI fireworks and all. An opening ceremony for an athletics world championships is by its nature more understated. But this was ingenious, fun and stirring.

There were no giant hypodermics or anthropomorphic blood bags parading the track, though the fluffy fake clouds may have been an oblique reference to the shroud of controversy that has settled over athletics. Say what you like about the Chinese, but they know how to put on an opening ceremony. The watching Coe, for one, will be hoping for some performances to match over the next nine days to lift the clouds over his sport.