A senior figure working with one of London’s Olympic partners has told insidethegames that Jowell’s willingness to enter into discussions about West Ham United moving in to the stadium after the Games is a reversal of her previous stance.

"I was at meetings three or four years ago with the Minister and Ken Livingstone, when he was Mayor of London, and they did not want to have a football club in there," the official, who asked not to be identified, told insidethegames.

"This is a significant U-turn," they said.

Last week, West Ham's new co-owner, David Sullivan, said that he wanted to move the Premiership club from its century-old Upton Park home, to the 2012 venue after the Olympic and Paralympic Games. 

"It's a major part of our strategy that West Ham move to the Olympic Stadium," Sullivan said.

"I cannot comprehend how a Government can build a ground and then reduce it to 25,000."

Cabinet Minister Jowell responded by re-opening the possibility of negotiating a deal to maximise the sporting use of the stadium, which benefits from excellent public transport links at Stratford and all the facilities being built into the Olympic Park.

"We’ve made an explicit commitment to athletes in this country, and to the International Olympic Committee, that the stadium will become a grand prix athletics stadium," Jowell said in a BBC London interview.

"There will be a process whereby the Olympic Park Legacy Company will decide who will get the space in the stadium.

"If West Ham are interested in putting in a serious bid, then they should do so."

Sebastian Coe's pledge to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to deliver a national athletics stadium after the Olympics - following London’s failure to build the promised venue for the 2003 and 2005 athletics World Championships - was seen as key in London winning the bid to stage the 2012 Games.

Present plans are for the 80,000-seater stadium to be reduced to 25,000 capacity after the Games, with the athletics track remaining.

But even were London to win the rights to host future athletics World or European Championships at the venue - UK Athletics has lodged an interest in staging the Europeans in 2016 or 2018 - questions have been raised about the financial viability of the venue when it would stage no more than a handful of elite track events each year.

There are even doubts whether 25,000 is sufficient capacity for major athletics events - Crystal Palace readily sells its 36,000 seats for its two-day Grand Prix meeting each summer.

Plans for the 2015 Rugby World Cup already include matches at the Olympic Stadium, which would also stage games in the 2018 FIFA World Cup if England wins its bid to stage the tournament.

Both World Cups would expect to use a 50,000-seat stadium.

Among ideas to make the facility work on a daily basis has been for the University of East London to use it as a campus for its sports courses. Livingstone’s successor as London Mayor, Boris Johnson, has led calls to renew the search for an "anchor tenant" from football or rugby.

According to Sullivan’s business partner, David Gold, all parties are investigating whether retractable seating, that can move across the track area when the stadium is in football mode, as they have at the Stade de France in Paris, can be included in London. 


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