But those plans were all thrown out the window on Friday when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced that the original stadium design was being scrapped because of escalating costs. Endo called Mori to persuade him on Friday morning, the day the decision was announced, sources said. “But the prime minister has pledged his full support to ensure a successful 2019 Rugby World Cup”.
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As a result, the stadium will not be completed in time for the 2019 rugby World Cup, as planned, Mr Abe said. While selecting a new design might indicate that Japan is no longer willing to throw good money after bad, there’s no way to be certain that the design alone accounted for the enormous construction costs for National Stadium-which, at $2 billion, would have been the most expensive stadium ever realized.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was under increasing pressure at home to come up with an alternative, and the extravagant facility also was at odds with the IOC’s new cost-cutting reforms known as Olympic Agenda 2020.
“We will minimise the cost as much as we can and make one that is best and realistic”. Going back further than the design process, Japan might have not committed itself to such an exorbitant Olympic Games in the first place if Tokyo was not committed to the required cost or stadium capacity.
Zaha Hadid’s controversial plans for the 2020 Olympic Stadium in Tokyo have been scrapped.
In a statement, International Olympic Committee official John Coates said his organization looks forward to seeing “a feasible solution that will offer a state of the art stadium with top level conditions for athletes and spectators”. Starting over from scratch is forcing Tokyo to give up the hosting duties for the 2019 Rugby World Cup.
The revised plan still imagined an 80,000-seat stadium, though, which seems particularly ambitious in a city where the largest regularly held sports events are professional baseball games.
A spokesman for World Rugby, organizers of the Rugby World Cup, said the group was “extremely disappointed” by the announcement that the stadium would not be able to host the tournament, which he said came “despite repeated assurances to the contrary”. The first design was done by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, a well-known and award-winning architect.
Support for Abe, who returned to office in 2012 pledging to bolster Japan’s defenses and reboot the economy, has slipped to around 40 percent on voter doubts about the legislation.
In reality, however, the Abe administration had little sense of the impending crisis with regard to the spiraling costs of the construction plan, primarily due to the prospective stadium’s two massive streamlined arches.
A truck leaves the now defunct construction site of Japan’s proposed new National Stadium in Tokyo.
“Taking various things into consideration and listening to a variety of opinions, we will take steps to keep this from becoming a burden on the people”, Yoshihide Suga, chief cabinet secretary, told a news conference on Friday. And just earlier this year, after five months of legal battle, Hadid settled on a libel case against the New York Review of Books and its critic Martin Filler.
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Ms. Hadid’s firm, Zaha Hadid Architects, issued a statement after Mr. Abe’s announcement defending the stadium’s design, which the company said wasn’t responsible for the increased cost.
