BRISBANE, Australia — (AP) — A 60,000-seat stadium for the Brisbane Olympics to be built in inner-city parkland has been unveiled as part of a major overhaul of planning for the 2032 Summer Games.
David Crisafulli, the third premier of Queensland state in the almost four years since the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2032 Games to Brisbane, announced the latest plans on a rainy Tuesday at a Future Brisbane forum.
It's been more than 1,340 days since that IOC decision in 2021, and local organizers still haven't commenced the Olympic venue construction program.
“The time has come to just get on with it — get on with it, and build," Crisafulli said, marking his 150th day in office. "We are going to start immediately. We've got seven years to make it work — and make it work we will.”
A 25,000-seat aquatics center has also been proposed in an Olympic precinct that includes the new main stadium at Victoria Park, a former golf course near downtown Brisbane.
The initial 11 years that Brisbane had to prepare is now down to seven, and leaders at federal, state and local levels agree it’s time to stop squabbling over venues and start building them.
Newly elected IOC president Kirsty Coventry, who oversaw the initial planning stages as head of the IOC's coordination commission, has been updated on the changes by Andrew Liveris, chairman of the 2032 organizing committee.
Liveris said there'd been daily engagement between the so-called 100-day review panel, tasked with assessing all venue options, and his local organizing committee.
“The stage matters," he said. “We’ve still got 7½ years to go, and we have a plan. This is a go-get-it-done plan.”
Brisbane was the first Summer Games host picked in a new process to put a preferred candidate into exclusive, fast-track talks without facing a rival bidder in a vote. With it, the IOC aimed to cut the cost of campaigning and building venues.
It's been a year since local organizers scrapped initial plans to demolish and rebuild the Gabba, an iconic cricket ground, as the centerpiece of the 2032 Games when a previous review panel appointed in 2023 recommended a new stadium in city parkland.
The costs of the Gabba rebuild had soared and the concept lost the support of the Australian Olympic Committee.
The premier at the time, Steven Miles, rejected the recommendations of that review led by former Brisbane Mayor Graham Quirk. Miles instead planned to upgrade an existing rugby stadium to host the opening and closing ceremonies, and to renovate a facility built in the city’s southern outskirts to host the 1982 Commonwealth Games as the track and field venue.
Crisafulli went to a state election late last year promising no new stadiums, but then instituted another review quickly after taking power for the Liberal-National coalition. His cabinet went through the recommendations and approved the new plans Monday.
Domestic media earlier this week raised concerns about crocodiles at the Olympic rowing venue when it leaked that events would be staged on the Fitzroy River at Rockhampton on the central Queensland coast.
Crisafulli confirmed the proposed Fitzroy River venue, and said a “multitude” of events had been staged there — including Australia's pre-Olympic rowing camps. He said local kids swam and paddled in the river most weekends and crocodiles weren't a problem.
Rowing Australia said the crocodile concerns were overblown in the media but raised some issues about the river current and its suitability for Olympic competition. Liveris said World Rowing would visit the venue in May.
He also wasn't worried about crocodiles at the rowing venue.
“There’s sharks in the ocean and we still do sailing and we still do surfing,” he said, downplaying the impact of wildlife. “It’s a bit kind of Hollywood-ish. I’m not worried about crocodiles."
A small group of protesters gathered outside the riverside location where Crisafulli confirmed the revised venue plan. Dozens more protestors converged on Victoria Park, holding up “Hands OFF Victoria Park” signs and shouting “shame” while listening to news of the announcement.
The Save Victoria Park community group is fundraising for a legal challenge in a bid to prevent the stadium being built in the hilly, 64-hectare (158-acre) park.
Brisbane organizers plan to host Olympic sports in coastal cities and sites from the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coasts in the south to Cairns in Queensland’s far north and to the gateway of the Outback at Toowoomba, where an equestrian hub will be built. Cairns is about 1,700 kilometers (1,050 miles) north of Brisbane.
The state and federal governments initially agreed a 50-50 funding split on a venue budget of just over 7 billion Australian dollars ($4.4 billion).
The bulk of federal money was for an indoor arena adjacent to the city center that was initially set to host Olympic aquatics in a drop-in pool and later be transformed to host the National Basketball League and concerts.
That project has been scrapped, with Crisafulli's government aiming to spread the federal funding around other venues and seeking private-sector funding to build a similar arena on state-owned land near the Gabba, outside the scope of the Olympics.
Under the new plan, the Gabba is set to be demolished after the 2032 Games and replaced with housing. The main existing tenants — the Brisbane Lions in the Australian Football League and Queensland Cricket — have endorsed the plan to relocate them to the Victoria Park stadium that will have a post-Olympic and Paralympic capacity of 63,000.
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