For two golden weeks, the eyes of the world were trained onRio de Janeiro. Next week, the media spotlight swings back towards Brazils coastal city for the start of theParalympics. But what happens once the athletes are done and the last spectators go home'Answer: legacy. This simple word has becomedefinitional for the International Olympic Committeeover recent years. To justify the huge expenditure that major sporting championships represent, Games organisers have to demonstrate value for money long after the final medal ceremony.Physical infrastructure plays a big part in the legacy equation. What to do with all those stadia, arenas, dining halls, velodromes and so on'Get it right and you canregenerate a deprived part of a city, as the London 2012 Olympics are widely credited for doing. Get it wrong and you can be left stuck with Olympic-sized white elephants, as therundown facilitiesat Athens Hellinikon and Palaio Faliro Olympic complexes bear out.Repurposing, reusing and even relocating buildings are among the various strategies for securing a sporting venues long-term legacy, says Glenn Scott, a Sydney-based infrastructure expert at design practiceHassell. Whichever option organisers end up choosing, the universal injunction is to decide upfront and not dilly-dally until the Games have finished.On paper the easiest thing to do is design a bunch of bespoke Olympic venues, which then you end up after an Olympics trying to retrofit for some other useFar better is to decide what a country actually needs and then fit an Olympic event into that building, Scott says.Of all the infrastructure used for major sporting events, stadia are by far the most inflexible. Typically built in radial formats and peppered with columns, opportunities for reuse are limited. (Far better are free-standing, rectilinear building: think warehouses, basically).London has learned the hard way. The cost of converting the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park into a home ground for Premier League football clubWest Ham United has topped 700m making it more expensive per spectator than refitting Wembley stadium.If theyd at first thought it was going to be a football stadium, then theyd have designed it first and foremost as a football venue and retrofitted it for the Olympics. But they did it the other way around, Scott says.Smaller, more flexible venues and facilities are certainly easier to repurpose. Olympic villages are the most obvious case in point, as the plush residential enclaves of Newington in Sydney and Chaoyang district in Beijing now testify. Or take theinternational broadcast centre at Londons Olympic Park, which now houses TV and editing suites for the television channel BT Sport.Adapting existing buildings presents an attractive option too: less resource use, less environmental impact, less investment. The classic example here is Athens use of the Panathenaic stadium (scene of the opening ceremony of the first modern Olympics in 1896) for the archery competition and marathon finish in the 2004 Olympics. The Rio organisers followed suit, adapting the Sambdromo (the venue of the Rio Carnival) to the same ends. In 2000, theSydneyConvention and Exhibition Centre was similarly modified for a host of indoor competitions.Relocating venues can lead to potential legacy gains as well, experts note. The blue-and-pink artificial surface used by hockey competitors in the London 2012 Olympics, for example, now graces the pitches of Sheffield Hallam University in Yorkshire. The cost of dismantling, transporting and rebuilding facilities is problematic, however. Hence the decision toditch plans to relocate the basketball stadiumused in London 2012 for the Rio Olympics.Temporary buildings have to be really temporary, says Nicholas Reynolds, senior principal at architectural design firm Populous, which specialise in sports arenas and facilities. If you can break the buildings down into their smallest component parts then that allows them to be dispersed into the supply chain and repurposed much more simply.If theres a single factor on which the legacy question rides, it is the extent to which Games venues are integrated into a citys existing infrastructure. The vogue for a long time (especially in the United States) was to build stadia on huge empty lots out of town, buttressing them on all sides with car parks.Today, the thinking has turned full circle: the more central, the better. Barcelona, which used the 1992 Olympics to regenerate downtown industrial areas of the city, provides a stellar example. Sydney less so: the citys Olympic Park lies 16km from the central business district. Tokyo is taking Barcelonas lead and using the Olympics to hopefully regenerate its downtown waterfront district.By locating venues in the heart of a big city, you have the benefit of not creating white elephants on the edge of town and instead creating spaces that can be easily reused by businesses and others, says Rob Turner, an urban infrastructure expert at advisory firm Grant Thornton, which was commissioned toassess the legacy of the 2012 London Olympics(pdf). You also get the benefit of existing transport infrastructure, which makes them easy for people to access and popular with businesses.Join the conversation about this storyNOW WATCH: What abandoned Olympic venues from around the world look like today
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