for a few glorious weeks a city’s olympic venues are in the global spotlight. but then what? the need to leave a legacy has never been more relevant. words by PAUL KENDALL Photography by spencer murphy
n a cold, bright day at the beginning of spring, I stood outside the space-age Aquatics Centre in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, turned the handle on a ‘sound station’, and found myself transported back to the heart-thumping excitement of the 2012 Games. Contained within the machine was a recording of 17,500 spectators screaming themselves hoarse as they watched the British Paralympian Ellie Simmonds overtake American world record holder Victoria Arlen and take gold in her favourite event – the 400m freestyle. At the time Lord Coe, chairman of the London 2012 organizing committee, said the extraordinary noise inside the Aquatics Centre and other venues was the best possible endorsement of the Games, and a noisy rebuke to those cynics who had predicted a multi-billion-pound damp squib. Most of those Olympic “doom-mongers”, as London mayor Boris Johnson called them, had to admit he had a point; the Olympics and Paralympics had electrifed the nation and shown the world that Britain could still stage colossal events with style, effciency and not a little humour. But the jury was still out, the critics warned, on the second aim of Coe’s project: to “inspire a generation” in the grip of an obesity epidemic to lead sportier, healthier lives. Now, two-and-a-half years after the Olympic fame was fnally extinguished, another noise, again inside the Aquatics Centre, suggests that Coe is winning that argument, too. Reverberating around the venue’s 50m training pool, just after 10 o’clock on a Wednesday morning, are the voices of 60 schoolchildren, parents and toddlers, all of whom have travelled to this fast-growing area of east London to take advantage of the building’s new life as a municipal leisure centre. Architect Zaha Hadid’s wave-like creation, one of the most spectacular Olympic venues in the world, has become a legacy success story. After an 18-month transformation programme, in which the two wings that contained 15,000 of the 17,500 seats were removed and replaced with 628 panes of glass, the centre now offers a vast array of courses and sessions for everyone from complete beginners to elite athletes. 158 Baku.