Ready. Set. Wait. It’ll be another year or two before construction begins on the main Olympic stadium for the Brisbane 2032 Olympics.
And this is supposedly in racing mode.
It’s taken almost four years since the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2032 Summer Games to Brisbane to finalize a cohesive venue plan, and now the countdown is serious for the 7.1 billion Australian dollars (US$4.4 billion) construction program.
Stephen Conry, chairman of the 2032 independent infrastructure coordination authority, on Wednesday said after the design and approvals phase, “the likely date or year for shovels in the ground for the (main) stadium would be 2026, ’27.”
“There’s a lot of work to be done when you start spending billions of dollars on infrastructure and development,” he said. “We have over seven years, plenty of time to build a stadium. We’ll have it ready in 2031 and for a period longer than is required for preparation for the Games.”
Conry, who led a state government-ordered 100-day review into Games planning, joined Andrew Liveris, the president of the Brisbane 2032 organizing committee, in pitching the Olympic construction and legacy plan to the Infrastructure Association of Queensland a day after state Premier David Crisafulli unveiled the latest concepts.
A new 60,000-seat stadium built in inner-city parkland, a sailing venue on the Whitsunday islands near the Great Barrier Reef and a crocodile-inhabited rowing venue i n Rockhampton on Queensland’s central coast are part of the program that Crisafulli launched with a theme that seemed universal among politicians and citizens: just get on with it.
The original bid idea floated by then-Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to renovate a 130-year-old cricket stadium known as the Gabba to become the centerpiece of the Olympics was scrapped by her successor Steven Miles a year ago. Miles lost government last year to Crisafulli, who broke an election promise of no new stadiums but said it was in the best interests of the public.
Rather than shrink the scale, his government expanded it to cities and sites up and down the Queensland coast, factoring in international tourist destinations and relatively lesser-known regions. Some of them — the rowing for instance — may ultimately be rejected by international sports federations. But it’s on the drawing board. The state government also aims to bring in private-sector funding for an indoor arena that will be outside the Olympic scope but could possibly become a venue for events in 2032.
There’s also the inclusion of a 25,000-seat aquatic center that will become home to a national academy is also in the Victoria Park precinct, and has been positively received by the swimming community.
“We are a gold medal factory,” Liveris said of Australia’s consistently strong national swimming program. “For goodness sake, let’s give our swimmers, young generation, the next generation, a chance to make us proud on the world stage as they did in Paris and same with our Paralympians.”
Critics have said the new main stadium will decrease green space in the city and add to traffic congestion, and have questioned the budget for a stadium at Victoria Park that was initially proposed in 2023 at a cost of A$3.4 billion but has already risen to almost A$3.8 billion.
Liveris said domestic media polls showed the Queensland public supported the Brisbane Olympic Games “overwhelmingly.”
“Even the worst critics have come to the the table and said ‘let’s get on with it,’” he said. “This is a palpable sense of opportunity. This is a gift.”
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AP Olympics at https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games
