“Poland and Ukraine”. With these words said two years ago, Michel Platini, the head of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Executive Committee announced the host of football finals of European Championship in 2012. What is the state of stadiums’ preparation? You will find the answer in following report.
With every month bringing us closer to the Euro 2012 Championships, which will take place on the Polish and Ukrainian football fields the number of skeptics and malcontents (as media often refer to as euro-sceptics) is decreasing. The assurance of Polish cities, in which the championships are to be held, of the Polish Soccer Association and UEFA ,for a long period of time were not enough to suppress the country ‘s opinion that there’s no way Poland can prepare the Championships.
The Euro-skeptics pointed out that our country hasn’t got the required conditions to perform such a prestigious event, adding that Poland will not be able to build at least four arenas for the Championships. Such voices were going hand in hand along with some ‘organization problems’ , ‘calling off the Championships’ and the ‘forthcoming crisis’ which every now and then appeared in the foreign and sometimes also Polish media.
Now it can be seen that the situation has changed.- some of the stadiums are ‘growing’ on our eyes. The last biddings are settled and contracts are being signed. This resulted quickly in reducing the voices of malcontents.
Moreover, the ‘crisis’ helped somewhat in the organization of the event. The companies competing in the bidding have decreased the cost of building new arenas, thus hundreds of millions of zlotys was saved.
In Poland, several cities are preparing for the Championships in which the players, arbiters and ,above all, the spectators are supposed to stay. Among all of them the greatest tension and the biggest expectations can be found in Chorzow, Gdansk, Cracow, Poznan, Warsaw and Wrocław- the cities in which arenas for the championships are being built. All „eyes” of Poland and UEFA are on the six Polish cities-candidates. The progress of building the stadiums is being carefully monitored.
In May UEFA announced that the final list of cities-organizators will be made available for the public. For sure, only two of those cities can be included in the list- Kiev and Warsaw. The other 10 cities have to do their best to improve their images in order to be selected. In the following report we don’t intend to assess the chances of those cities to be the host of the Championships. We ‘pass’ this role to UEFA presidents, who will have to decide where the matches will be played. In this report we will concentrate on the current progress of the works, which were presented in detail by photo reports.
Warsaw
The National Stadium in Warsaw, which is being built, is the only arena which will welcome players and mainly spectators. The construction works of the first stage of building the National Stadium started in October the previous year and were supposed to be continued till the turn of April and May. It was supposed to be continued but it finished earlier. Bearing in mind the Polish ‘standards’ this is marvelous – before the deadline.
The range and pace of the construction works is indeed impressing. From the area of the Decade Stadium 340 thousand of cubic meters of the ground was relocated, 14 thousand of piles and columns was stuck and nearly 31 thousand of square meters of slurry walls appeared. Pol-Aqua coped with such a wide range of construction works in 5 months. What is more, the works would probably finish earlier if it wasn’t for the ‘gift’ from the workers who decided that in the Christmas time they won’t disturb the citizens of Warsaw in celebrations.
During the preparation of the basin of the old Decade Stadium for the construction works of the new National Stadium , the bidding procedures were in Progress. They were supposed to select the builder of the main arena of the Championships. The complexity of the procedures delayed the final selection for a few weeks. Last but not least, the National Centre of Sport, after answering hundreds of questions, could at last open the bids and announced the company which will be the main contractor of the National Stadium. After examining all the offers , on the 15 of April it was announced that the final winner of the bidding is a German Austrian consortium Hydrobudowa Polska S.A from Alpine Bau Deutschland AG, Alpine Bau GmbH and Alpine Construction Polska sp. Z.o.o, which are to built the Stadium with the total sum of 1,25 billon PLN. The winner of the bidding plans to start the construction works in May and the facility will be given to usage after two years of construction.
This is the end of first part of stadiums reoprt. The next part of report will come soon…