Just a week after we were all taken aback that work on the Olympic stadium had begun ahead of schedule, its fate is being discussed with potential hosts of the next Games and the idea mooted to recycle its seats for reuse in 2016.
It was always planned for the sunken cupcake to have a certain number of permanent seats with extra capacity retained only for the period of the Games. Discussions with Chicago, an early favourite for winning the 2016 beast, could see 55,000 of the stadium's seats reused at the next Olympics. The Olympic Delivery Authority confirmed that they would be open to talks with other prospective host nations too in an innovative bid to contain and reduce costs on 2012 and potentially enable poorer countries to bid to host future Games, if resources can be shared and reused.
We rather like the idea that London's bolted on, bucket seats could end up going global and bearing mute witness to countless quadrennial sporting extravaganzas. Perhaps at each outing, they could collect Olympic graffiti from their closing ceremonial occupants, like a battered suitcase gathering destination stickers, and become Olympic collectors' items by 2040?
Back in the real world (sort of) David Beckham and Leona Lewis have been fingered as representative of the London zeitgeist to participate at the closing ceremony in Beijing where the Olympics will be handed over to us. The pretties will apparently "sprinkle some stardust on the show." Hang on though, whilst Leona can certainly be classified as bona fide London born, aspirational achiever (albeit in pop music), doesn't the sculpted Becks live in LA these days?
Image courtesy of markandrew's Flickrstream under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence.
