THE first glimpse of what a London Olympics would look like reveals an 80,000-seater stadium with diaphanous roof sections resembling giant insect wings.

An artist’s impression of the main stadium, released by the 2012 bid committee, also shows Athens gold medallist Kelly Holmes racing to victory on its main screen. She will be 42 if and when the games come to Britain.

The images are being released in a bid to impress on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) the ways in which London will provide showpiece arenas and athletes’ facilities for the games.

The £300m stadium would be built on a 500-acre site in Stratford, east London, close to a new station which would serve a fast Channel tunnel rail link. But planners are taking no chances with the unpredictable British summer. The roofing details have been left deliberately vague: it has yet to be decided whether the translucent sections covering the seating areas would remain fixed or whether they could close, like an insect’s wing casings, to form a weatherproof cover.

“They are not meant to be insect wings but there is certainly something futuristic about the stadium,” said a spokesman for the city’s bid committee.

London’s Olympic planners have abandoned plans to convert the arena into a football stadium after the games in the way that Manchester City football club took over a stadium after Manchester’s 2002 Commonwealth Games.

Instead they want a prefabricated design which would allow the upper tiers to be removed and the roof lowered to provide a 30,000-seater stadium for athletics after the games. It would replace south London’s Crystal Palace as the home of British athletics. The seating sections will be removable and could be taken away to provide new, smaller stadiums elsewhere.

An Olympic village to house up to 17,800 athletes and officials would be built within a few hundred metres of the stadium with an electric cart service to ferry them to the track and field events. An estimated 5,000 new homes would be provided on the site after the Olympics.

An aquatic centre, due for completion in 2006, will provide two 50-metre pools and other facilities, whether or not the London Olympics bid succeeds.

The buildings are to be constructed on a “brownfield” site now used largely by metal dealers and car-part traders. A “fridge mountain” of legally dumped appliances is already being cleared.

The games could cost as much as £2.5 billion to stage but it is claimed that they could attract at least as much in extra tourism and investment.

In a poll last summer, 67% of Londoners said they supported the capital’s bid to host the games but rejected a proposed levy on council tax of £20 a year for 10 years to pay part of the costs. Instead, the new buildings could be paid for from a new Olympic lottery game. Camelot, the lottery operator, has forecast a total income of £779m by 2012.

The impression of what the stadium will look like has been developed by HOK Sport, the bid’s architectural consultants, although a competition open to other architects is likely to take place. HOK has already laid plans for its own entry by employing Peter Cook, a British architect short-listed for last month’s Stirling prize.

Derek Wilson, a principal at HOK Sport which has worked on every Olympics venue since Atlanta in 1996, said: “At this stage we are trying to define an architectural quality for the stadium without dictating to architects how they must design. It’s got to be a first-class facility.”

The design is the culmination of 15 months’ work. The new buildings will be used with existing sports facilities and sites such as Horse Guards Parade in central London which could host the beach volleyball competition.

London 2012 is due to submit its full application document to the 124-strong IOC a week tomorrow. The other short-listed cities for the games are Paris, New York, Madrid and Moscow. A final decision will be made next July.

Lord Coe, the former Olympic gold medallist and chairman of the London 2012 campaign, said: “What is unique about this plan is the imaginative use of old and new.

We have existing and iconic in Lords, Wimbledon, Hyde Park and Horse Guards Parade.

“As well as these existing world-class facilities, we also have cutting-edge new-generation sports venues in the new Olympic Park that will be the best purpose-built facilities in the world.”

Daley Thompson, another former gold medal winner, said: “Once the games are over, the legacy that will be left will be fit for everybody in the community.”

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