Sotherton hits out at West Ham's Olympic Stadium proposal

KELLY Sotherton has slammed the proposal to allow West Ham United to move to the London 2012 Olympic Stadium, insisting it should serve purely as an athletics venue.

HITTING OUT: Olympic bronze medallist Kelly Sotherton is angered by proposals for West Ham to move into the Olympic Stadium (Getty Images)

Upon completing their take over the east London Premier League football club, David Gold and David Sullivan stated their intentions to become tenants at the £500m 80,000-seater stadium.

The stadium has become a focal point of London 2012 organisers' legacy plans with chairman Lord Sebastian Coe adamant the venue must keep its capacity to stage athletics events.

The original plan was to reduce the stadium to a more manageable 25,000 capacity but that would deter West Ham, while a compromise of approximately 50,000 has also been proposed.

But heptathlete Sotherton, an Olympic bronze medallist, is adamant that Great Britain needs a national athletics stadium.

"The legacy should be athletics - we don't have a national athletics stadium and we need one.  It's out of order that football think they can just come and have it," she said.

"We lost our last big stadium to Manchester City in 2002 after a great Commonwealth Games and we're worried that we'll lose another one to football.

"I'm a massive fan of football and a big Arsenal fan, but at the end of the day it's our stadium and I think the legacy is to enable us to stage future world and commonwealth championships."

Olympic Minister Tessa Jowell has recently poured cold water on West Ham's plans, insisting the stadium must be first and foremost for athletics and remains keen to see the stadium reduced in size, wary of the £176 million it could cost to maintain at Olympics capacity until 2018.

However, Mayor of London Boris Johnson, along with Shadow Olympics Minister Hugh Robertson, wants to see the stadium maintained at its full size and utilised for potentially lucrative events, such as the 2015 Rugby World Cup or even Twenty20 cricket.

The stadium is also on the shortlist for England's bid for the 2018 Fifa World Cup in an ‘either-or' option along with the proposed new White Hart Lane as Lord Triesman hedges his bets until an decision on the Olympic Stadium has been made.

The Olympic Park Legacy Company, headed by Baroness Ford, is still currently conducting its review into the future of the stadium.