… Bid follows fiasco of Picketts Lock
(REUTERS) – London will bid this year to stage the 2017 world athletics championships in Britain for the first time after being forced to withdraw as the 2005 hosts because a proposed stadium was deemed to be too expensive.
“The world athletics championships is the greatest sporting event never staged in the United Kingdom and we’re committed to changing that,” UK Athletics (UKA) chairman Ed Warner said in a statement yesterday.
No venue was mentioned but the Olympic stadium in east London, which will stage the athletics competition at next year’s Games, is the obvious choice.
London Premier League soccer club West Ham United is committed to providing an athletics legacy by keeping the track when it moves to the stadium after the Games.
A formal bid must be submitted to the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) by September 1.
London was awarded the 2012 Olympics ahead of Paris in Singapore in 2005 despite the embarrassment of relinquishing the world athletics championships it had been due to stage in the same year.
A decision by the British government four years earlier that the Picketts Lock stadium was too expensive was widely criticised at the time as an embarrassment for the United Kingdom and a blow to its hopes of ever staging major international sports events.

DIACK OUTRAGED
Among the critics was the head of the London 2012 organising committee, Sebastian Coe, who headed the capital’s successful bid team in Singapore.
“People abroad must be looking at us with incredulity and if I was sitting on the IAAF committee I’d genuinely wonder if we in Britain were capable of operating a whelk stall,” Coe told the BBC at the time.
There was further controversy this year when Premier League Tottenham Hotspur said it would remove the athletics track if it won the right to move into the Olympic stadium ahead of West Ham, even though the London bid team had promised an athletics legacy after the Games.
IAAF president Lamine Diack described the proposition as “outrageous” and said the legacy promise had been a core policy of London’s bid.
London is the first city to say it is bidding for the 2017 championships and UKA said the event had the potential to bring an economic boost to the city of 100 million pounds ($160.4 million).
“Athletics is a truly global sport with more than 200 countries competing in the world championships. London is a perfect partner for this event with 270 nations represented by its seven million citizens. Every athlete from every country will be supported,” Warner said.