Olympics-West Ham face challenge to mix soccer with athletics - Reuters

By Martyn Herman

LONDON | Fri Feb 11, 2011 11:32am EST

LONDON Feb 11 (Reuters) - After winning the Olympic Stadium battle, now comes the hard bit for West Ham United who will achieve a feat that has eluded many clubs across Europe if they can co-habit happily with a running track around their pitch.

Sports bodies were queuing up to applaud the Olympic Park Legacy Company's decision on Friday to make West Ham their preferred bidders ahead of rivals Tottenham Hotspur.

The decision spares London the embarrassment of having a 500 million pounds ($802.4 million) stadium ripped down, but West Ham fans have every right to be wary of the move, which could come by 2014 providing the decision is rubber-stamped.

Tottenham said throughout the process that retaining a track made no sense, either financially or from a fans' perspective.

West Ham's owners insist they can meet the challenge and provide the club with a 60,000-seat stadium while satisfying the needs of athletics with a venue capable of hosting world championships and other major meetings.

Fans of the east London club, regarded as some of the most loyal and vociferous in England, will take some convincing that a move away from the noisy Upton Park ground, their home since 1904, will not have a detrimental effect on the atmosphere.

FOOTBALL ONLY

No other top flight ground in England has a running track around the pitch and even across Europe, where it was much more common, clubs are favouring "football only" venues.

In Italy, Rome's Olympic Stadium is shared by Serie A clubs AS Roma and Lazio but both sets of fans are unhappy at the distance they must sit from the pitch.

Roma, in the process of being sold, have long talked of building their own stadium without a track.

"I can assure you that Roma fans want and dream of a stadium without a track because now, with the track at the Olimpico, you see the games really badly because the stands are a long way from the pitch," Massimo Limiti, director of Roma fan website www.forzaroma.info, told Reuters.

Bayern Munich quit the city's 1972 Olympic Stadium in 2005 and now play in the futuristic Allianz Arena, while Bundesliga rivals VfB Stuttgart are getting rid of the athletics track in their stadium this summer.

"Finally it is going. No more track. This will be pure football from now on," Michael Eberle, who heads Stuttgart fan club Energie Metzingen told Reuters.

Not all such stadiums are so unpopular but fans rarely seem to bemoan a move away from a "hybrid" stadium.