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Budget Cuts Eliminate London 2012 Stadium Wrap

Seb Coe, head of the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games, said the loss of the fabric wrap around London’s main Olympic stadium won’t adversely affect the athletes’ performance.

Reuters reports the 516-million-pound venue was designed with a wrap covering steel girders and grey concrete sealing which would have allowed colourful images and slogans to light up the stadium at nights and minimize crosswinds.

But the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) changed the plan in order to save seven million pounds when the British government imposed the “severest” public spending cuts in generations, reports Reuters.

The overall Olympic budget of 9.3 billion pounds remains intact.

Coe, a former Olympic champion, told Reuters, “I am very clear the stadium fundamentally has to work for athletic performance – I have run in stadiums that haven’t always worked for athletic performance. That was the first thing I needed to satisfy myself that we weren’t impinging upon, and I think given the global scheme of things I don’t think this is such an unreasonable thing to live with”.

He added, “there may be some argument as to whether it (the wrap) actually accentuates the beauty of the stadium. I actually am not sure it does, but in a way that is an irrelevance.

“What we are looking at is a budget which in the large part was protected during an extraordinarily tough public spending round”.

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