Managing Olympic Venues Simon Darcy & Tracy Taylor
Infrastructure investment
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- Venue life cycle and Olympic life-cycle planning: cycles fundamentally at odds with each other
Infrastructure investmentCities that win the Olympic and Paralympic Games face major infrastructure investment across the Olympic precinct/s, athlete’s village, transport, security and venues. Depending upon the number of venues to be built billions of dollars are allocated to building new venues and in most cases upgrading older venues to Olympic standard. Yet, most bidding cities become so focused on the Olympic and Paralympic Games period that they fail to have in place a wider conceptualisation of venue life cycle or precinct master plan in making their decision. For example the Sydney 2000 Olympic and Paralympic Games main Olympic precinct at Homebush only established a master plan for the site some 10 years after the games had been completed . It is important for the host cities to consider the standard life cycle stages of venue management when considering the Olympic venue building programs . Figure # shows that there are three major stages within the life cycle on venues, which averages about 30 years. As most Olympic venues have a significant infrastructure investment, each host city organising committee must ask itself a number of important questions with respect to the level of investment, whether venues are to be permanent or temporary and how the venues are going to be managed into the future . For what may have been normally conceived as a two century building program for new venues within a city, the Olympics accelerate into a seven year building program with normal processes of feasibility, business planning, master plan and operational management manipulated for the Olympic dream. Until the Beijing 2008 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Vancouver 2010 and the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, legacy planning was almost all post hoc with little evidence of strategic master plan for venues across city planning. The Olympic dream circumvents “the normal” environmental planning processes through “fast tracking” development processes and manipulates standard sport and recreational strategic planning processes. Where standard practices within recreation planning of catchment or demographic approaches to venue provision would question the location and the viability of venue development, the long-term strategic planning circumvention is overridden by the economic management considerations of staging a mega event. The outcome for some host cities has been tragic at best and for others has tested their long term financial acumen. Figure: Venue Lifecycle Planning 
Source: Figure: Olympic Games Lifecycle Planning 
Source: It has been well documented that while most Olympic bids are fore grounded with economic impact studies that estimate the likely increase in economic activity due to construction, tourism and alike, few undertake broader cost benefit analysis of games development processes. With respect to venues specifically, few undertake life cycle costing and asset management approaches to venue management that would provide a realistic understanding of the likely life cycle cost of the venue for its average 30 year lifespan. Life cycle costing is a venue specific technique that provides a reality check for the boosterism of economic impact assessment. As demonstrate the ongoing asset maintenance of stadia has a significant impact on the financial bottom line of any corporate owned stadiums or a significant ongoing cost implication for triple bottom line approaches used within government ownership structures. Quite simply, if life cycle costing is not built into an understanding of Olympic city bidding, then the long-term sustainability of the city-state, the individual venues and the broader community is based on a false pretence. Venue life cycle and Olympic life-cycle planning: cycles fundamentally at odds with each otherFigure 1 and Figure 2 succinctly show the fundamental difference between host city and the International IOC Life cycle considerations for venue management. What is a 30 year framework for host cities it is a nine year race for the IOC in which to stage a two-week event. Yet, this is not to say that the IOC did not take the integrity of venues seriously as they want the venues that stage the Olympic Games to be first-rate and more recently on the contemporary edge of both design and social practice. The Olympic Games Study Commission was established as a response to the scale and scope of summer and winter Olympic Games in order to better manage the cost, size and complexity of staging future games . It was hoped that the Olympic Games Study Commission (OGSC) would create a more effective, efficient and streamlined games management. While the OGSC was established in 2001 (check) as early as 1911 the founder of the modern Olympics Pierre de Coubertin had the following to say in respect to recent Olympic Games, “It would be very unfortunate, if the often exaggerated expenses incurred for the most recent Olympiads, a sizeable part of which represented the construction of permanent buildings, which were moreover unnecessary - temporary structures would fully suffice, and the only consequence is to then encourage use of these permanent buildings by increasing the number of occasions to draw in the crowds - it would be very unfortunate if these expenses were to deter (small) countries from putting themselves forward to host the Olympic Games in the future.” Pierre de Coubertin, Olympic review, April 1911, pp 59-62 cited in One would have to ask why it took some 92 years for the IOC to have recommendations to implement Pierre's comments. One explanation is that the IOC had no vested interest in ensuring that the bidding and host cities did not overcommit themselves to unsustainable construction efforts. It was not until the adverse publicity of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics scandals that the IOC became engaged in a long overdue exercise to examine the relative effectiveness and efficiency venue construction processes on the long-term sustainability of host city Olympic venues. The OGSC recommendations with respect to venues are included in Appendix A. While the process for selecting the host city from the bidding cities remains a combination of technical assessment, political voting by members of the IOC and media spectacle, there is at least guiding documents for the role of venues within the bidding process and the ultimate selection of the host city. The document that outlines the requirements for the bidding cities is the Candidate Acceptance Procedure document . The document clearly outlines the importance of the venues, what is required of bidding cities in documenting the venue provision and costing. As shown in Figure #, in a life cycle assessment of the feasibility for a new stadium in Perth Western Australia, the case is clearly made that life cycle costing assessment substantially downgrades likely profit forecasts over the life of the venue and makes feasibility of stadiums closely associated with the likely seating capacity and market dynamics of the host community . Figure #: Venue Profit and Loss Statements before and after incorporating life-cycle maintenance cost 
Source: One of the few examples of life cycle costing assessment was theoretically carried out for Olympic Stadiums was conducted on the Sydney 2000 Olympic and Paralympic games where life cycle costing was employed on Stadium Australia . The results assessment showed that over the life of the venue for basic and enhanced cases there would have been significant reductions in energy, water, greenhouse gas emissions, as well as air and water pollution. During the construction phase it was also shown that there would have been a similar magnitude reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. These principles are firmly established within the mainstream construction industry but it is unclear how life cycle costing is evaluated within the selection of host city bids. With regard to the post-Olympic use of venues within a city, then one of the arguments as being that the improved sporting infrastructure will contribute to both participatory sport and spectator sport legacy for host the cities. The notion that the Olympics "naturally" increase sport participation through the "trickle-down effect" where the inspiration of national heroes create a ground swell of grassroots participation has been increasingly challenged in the literature . The picture is not so clear with regard to the legacy of increased spectator attendance at professional sports that use the new venues post-games is not so clear. This is mainly because there is very little research that has been done on this effect. Research in a different context like US-based research on the spectator effect of new venues within American major league baseball sought to determine the "honeymoon" effect of a new stadium. To do so they used MLB team attendance data from 1950 to 2002, which was treated to separate quality-of-play effects. They estimated that the "honeymoon" effect increases attendance by 32% to 37% in the opening year of a new stadium where attendance remains above the baseline for only two seasons for stadiums built during 1960-1974 but for 6-10 seasons for new venues. Directory: bitstream -> 10453 bitstream -> Amphitheater High School’s Outdoor Classroom: a study in the Application of Design bitstream -> Ethics of Climate Change: Adopting an Empirical Approach to Moral Concern bitstream -> The Age of Revolution in the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal and South China Sea: a maritime Perspective bitstream -> Methodism and Culture bitstream -> Review of coastal ecosystem management to improve the health and resilience of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area bitstream -> Present state of the area 10453 -> A hybrid fuzzy-based Personalized Recommender System for Telecom Products/Services 10453 -> Implementing Digital Media Presentations as Assessment Tools for Pharmacology Students Jorge Reyna*, Peter Meier, Francis Geronimo and Kenneth Rodgers 10453 -> Perceptions of the Hospital School Experience: Implications for Pedagogy and the use of Technology 10453 -> Sex and the Virtual Suburbs: The Pornosphere and Community Standards. Alan McKee1, Brian McNair, Anne-Frances Watson Introduction: From physical spaces to virtual spaces Download 150.84 Kb. Share with your friends:
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