China's Olympic swim centre to become water park

(AFP PHOTO / Greg WOOD)

Beijing's Olympic aquatic centre will be reborn as a water park with slides and a wave machine, state press said Thursday, as the city struggles to prevent its 2008 Games venues becoming white elephants.

The revamp of the Water Cube, where superstar Michael Phelps swam to eight Olympic gold medals and which is famed for its distinctive bubble-wrap skin, will cost 200 million yuan (29 million dollars), the China Daily reported.

The park will include seven-storey slides, a wave machine, shopping arcades, cafes, and performance stages when it reopens in July, the report said.

"A Canadian company is designing and building these facilities to make the venue one of the biggest and most modern water parks in the world," Yang Qiyong, deputy general manager of the venue, was quoted as saying.

According to the report, the venue, officially known as the National Aquatics Centre, attracted a peak of 100,000 visitors a day following the August 2008 Games.

But as enthusiasm for the Games has worn off, and in the absence of other world-class aquatic competitions, the number of visitors has fallen off sharply, it said.

The venue still earned 170 million yuan last year through ticket sales and commercial events, but that is far less than the Bird's Nest stadium located just across the Olympic Green, it added.

Operators hope the water park will pull in new crowds and rake in at least 20 million yuan this summer alone.

The Bird's Nest - so named for its design of interlaced steel girders - was placed under government management in November in a bid to stem financial losses, state media reports said.

Only a handful of major events have taken place at the venue since the Olympics.

Reports have said that in the first year following the 2008 Games, the stadium earned 260 million yuan, 70 percent of which came from sales of tickets merely to tour the venue itself and visitor numbers were said to be dropping.

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