Birmingham is now the PERFECT home for UK athletics – we don’t need the London Stadium anymore

The closing observe of the 2022 Commonwealth Games had barely been swallowed by the evening air when the first massive thought was launched in its wake.

Birmingham 2036. An Olympic Games for the Second City. That’s the place euphoria will get you. Pipe goals, castles in the sky. This nation final hosted in 2012 — so it could be a brief hole of 24 years. That’s not how the fashionable Olympics works.

Australia will wait 32 years between Sydney 2000 and Brisbane 2032. France’s 2024 version will nod to the centenary of the final summer season Games in Paris. Tokyo 2020 was 56 years on from 1964. The wait for Athens was 108 years. The exception is the 12 years that handed between Los Angeles 1984 and Atlanta 1996 — however Atlanta is broadly considered the worst Olympics of the put up-conflict period. So lesson discovered.

Birmingham has proven itself to be the excellent home for UK Athletics and an Olympic host 

Meaning, regardless of being fabulous hosts at comparatively brief discover, will probably be laborious for Birmingham to get Britain’s second Olympic Games in fast succession. Yet it might, and will, nonetheless profit from the occasions of the final weeks. Birmingham is the excellent home for UK Athletics. The coronary heart of the nation needs to be the coronary heart of the sport, simply as Manchester and its velodrome turned the centre of British Cycling following the Commonwealth Games there in 2002.

Birmingham deserves it. What has grow to be obvious this summer season is this is a metropolis stuffed with civic pleasure, with a longing to be recognised, to be included, to welcome guests and play its half. Athletics could be that half.

Birmingham has a practice of wonderful athletes by Birchfield Harriers — Denise Lewis, Kelly Sotherton, Ian Stewart, Peter Radford, Katharine Merry — plus the Alexander Stadium, which has hosted Diamond League occasions, the British Grand Prix and the Amateur Athletics Championships.

The metropolis deserves an Olympics after proving its civic pleasure and longing to be recognised

Birmingham has a monitor document of wonderful athletes they usually staged a profitable Commonwealth Games. Pictured: Laura Kenny after successful gold in the 10km scratch race 

And, now, the Commonwealth Games. After the success of this summer season, an extra refurbishment will imply the capability of the stadium can change between 18,000 and 40,000, based on demand. It is excellent for athletics. Compact when it must be, with the potential for growth. It couldn’t be extra completely different from athletics’ present home. A large, unwieldy and expensive white elephant in — the place else? — London.

The unloved London Stadium will host its first Diamond League assembly since 2019 in July subsequent 12 months. And that needs to be its farewell, too. We have ample distance from London 2012 for this to not be seen as a legacy betrayal. 

We find out about the medicine cheats. We know a lot of what we noticed, notably at the monitor, was false. The romance has gone. We additionally realize it prices £4-6million to transform the venue for athletics’ use. So, in impact, athletics has no home. It rents a room in a soccer stadium for just a few weeks in the summer season. And the nation picks up the tab.

How a lot better wouldn’t it be to let the important tenants, West Ham, pay the payments to have it their means, and permit athletics to decamp to a metropolis the place it felt wished?

The London Stadium has misplaced its romance since the 2012 Games – West Ham ought to pay the payments to have it their means and permit athletes to decamp to a metropolis the place the sport feels wished

West Ham’s household enjoyable day attracted a much bigger crowd than the final main athletics assembly at the London Stadium.

Why should every part be in the capital anyway? It wasn’t so way back that British athletics was related, strongly, with Gateshead. The stadium there has seen 5 world information fall and has hosted many worldwide conferences. It appears ludicrous that athletics has deserted its legacy outdoors London for the occasional jamboree in an echoing, half-empty bowl.

The individuals of Birmingham needs to be given the alternative to alter that. They have helped ship a pleasant, profitable Commonwealth Games in attempting circumstances. They might present the spark athletics wants. And you by no means know, down the line, that form of transformation would possibly ship an Olympics.