The site of the athletics track at Crystal Palace National Sports Centre was home to the FA Cup final from 1895 to 1914. For its penultimate edition as host, more than 120,000 people flocked there to watch Aston Villa beat Sunderland.
The venue was the backdrop to the first rugby meeting between England and the All Blacks — a 15-0 defeat for the hosts — and W G Grace even set up a cricket team in the wider area.
Icons of athletics have graced the track since its opening in the Sixties. Dave Bedford, the long-time race director of the London Marathon, broke the 10,000-metre world record on it, while the boss of World Athletics Seb Coe and his great rival Steve Ovett had countless duels at Crystal Palace.
In more recent times, the world’s fastest man, Usain Bolt, was racing down the home straight in the lead-up to the London Olympics. British athletes at the time referred to it as “the Wembley of track and field”.
Those Games, as glorious as they were, acted as a precursor for Crystal Palace to go to rack and ruin, with a bigger and better equipped venue for major athletics down the road.
The neglect got so bad that rats were scurrying across the indoor track, trees were growing out of the stands and pigeons were fouling tables at the café.
Only five years ago, there was talk of ripping up the main Jubilee stand and bringing the bulldozers in to do away with the outdoor and indoor tracks.
"The neglect got so bad that rats were scurrying across the indoor track, trees were growing out of the stands and pigeons were fouling tables"
After years of uncertainty, work has finally been taking place to repair the outside track and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has pledged millions to the development of the site, including two swimming pools which are cracked to the point they are unsafe to use.
Ben Woods, who worked on London 2012, is the man tasked by the Mayor with delivering a dramatic facelift. There is no disguising the local man’s belief and passion for the project.
Woods talked of Crystal Palace again becoming the heartbeat of athletics in the capital “365 days a year” for elite and amateur athletes alike. There is an ambition for international meetings returning within five years at what he called “a precious jewel, a crystal we want to preserve”.
The first stage of the work is patching things up to make facilities usable before major construction work begins in earnest. It is clear a further cash injection is needed, Woods talking about being 85 per cent there with funding but needing investment to realise the full ambitions of the project.
Attracting new money might not be easy but initial conversations are apparently looking positive. Twelve miles up the road lies the London Stadium, the home of the Olympics but for one month each year transformed into an athletics stadium, a key part of Coe’s legacy commitment for London 2012.
That comes with its own issues. Converting the venue for athletics each summer from a football stadium — West Ham’s home — is costly and this week UK Athletics admitted that this year’s Anniversary Games held there made a loss of between £100,000 and £500,000 even with 50,000 spectators.
Crystal Palace can house only 16,500 but there is the option to extend that to 25,000 with temporary stands. With the London Stadium costing taxpayers’ money, a switch makes sense in the longer term.
Whatever the outcome, Crystal Palace’s athletics revamp would be a shot in the arm for the sport in the week that UKA admitted it had lost a record £3.7 million for 2022-23. Much credit for the new wave of optimism must lie with the Crystal Palace Sports Partnership, set up nearly a decade ago to fight for its future across athletics, swimming and myriad other sports.
Its chairman John Powell, formerly of the Met Police but with a 45-year history of coaching at the site, described himself as “cautiously optimistic”.
He said: “All the talk of regeneration is positive, but we’ve got a mayoral election in May and, as much as they can tell us nothing will change, they’re politicians so go figure.”
With bulldozers being on the verge of going in to reduce rather than reconstruct, the future is looking bright even if it is way off being fully realised.
London desperately needs a home for athletics, whether that’s to provide a permanent stage for the next Usain Bolt or for grassroots events. It’s worth noting that in the year before the pandemic, 21 school sports days took place at the venue. Crystal Palace is the best possible answer for the sport in the capital — from the bottom to the top.
