Olympic Stadium mess almost finished Orient

Barry Hearn has revealed that he risked Leyton Orient's future to block West Ham's proposed move to the Olympic Stadium and he has warned the Government that he'll do it again if they 'illegally' shoehorn the Hammers into the stadium.

Hearn told The Football League Paper, 'We risked going out of business to challenge this.  You worry because all these legal costs mount up but we had a board meeting and decided that if West Ham moved to the Olympic Stadium that would put us out of business anyway so we had to challenge it.'

The whole Olympic Stadium saga has become a major embarrassment for London mayor Boris Johnson and the Government.   Ken Livingstone, Boris's Labour rival for the mayoralty, has been making poitical capital out of the fiasco.

The upshot may be that the idea of a football club moving in will be abandoned altogether.   The post-games use of the stadium could be limited to athletics, concerts and one off sporting events.   A football tenant has not been ruled out, but not at any price.

All the problems started with Lord Coe's insistence that the running track be retained after 2012.   This made it less attractive to football clubs with seats so far from the pitch.

The Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC) encouraged Spurs to put in a bid, the idea being that the running track problem could be overcome if equivalent facilities were provided elsewhere.   But the Spurs plan to upgrade Crystal Palace was dismissed as half-hearted by the OPLC.  

Spurs chairman David Levy was left feeling that he had been set up as a pasty in order for the OPLC to extract a more competitive deal from West Ham and Newham Council.   Spurs were, however, in effect able to use their pursuit of a judicial review to extract public money for a redevelopment at White Hart Lane, probably their preferred venue anyway.

West Ham might still get a £500m stadium at a knockdown price.   This leaves Leyton Orient who have received little help from the Football League.   However, the OPLC made the mistake of not conducting a full legal scrutiny of the West Ham-Newham proposal, leaving it open to claims that it had breached EU state aid rules.   Legal proceedings have now cost more than £1m.

No wonder some people are calling it the Millennium Dome Mark II.