West Ham stadium: 'Government lucky we stopped Olympic Stadium becoming white elephant,' says David Gold

Hammers to move in as tenants from the start of next season

The West Ham co-chairman David Gold (Getty )

West Ham United co-chairman David Gold said that the government was “lucky” that West Ham United were moving into the Olympic Stadium this summer because it has stopped the stadium from becoming a ‘white elephant’.

West Ham will move in as tenants from the start of next season, and play their last game at Upton Park after 112 years there on Tuesday night. While the deal the club have struck has led to some criticism, Gold yesterday defended it, saying that it would have been a waste of public money had a tenant like West Ham not moved in to provide the ground with regular Premier League football.

“In a way we are lucky,” Gold said. “We are lucky in the sense that we are 1.6 miles away from an iconic Olympic Stadium. It would not work if we were 116 miles away. So you can say that we were lucky that they built the Olympic Stadium. And thankfully, to a degree, they are lucky that they built the stadium in Stratford. Because if they built it anywhere else this would be a white elephant costing the taxpayer millions of pounds.”

A view of the Olympic Stadium (World Architecture Festival)

“This is not just my opinion,” Gold continued. “Look at the last 10 Olympic Stadiums built in the last 40 years. Nine of them are white elephants. Should they have built an Olympic Stadium exactly the way that other countries did? Rio, that is going to end up a white elephant, I promise you.”