Sports park planned for Neo but no place for Memorial Van Damme

The Neo project at Heysel in Brussels, a shopping and conference centre, has plans for a sports park within the complex, comprising an athletics track and possibly a 5,000-seater grandstand. However, the park, backed by the City of Brussels and Brussels-Capital Region, is not intended to provide a new home to the Memorial Van Damme, Neo’s chair Henri Dineur told Bruzz.

The Memorial is one of Belgium’s most important athletics meetings and dates back to 1977. It is held in memory of athlete Ivo Van Damme, who died in 1976 at the age of 22 in a car accident in the south of France. The Memorial takes place in the Roi Baudouin stadium, which is due to disappear when Neo is built. A new national stadium is planned nearby on Parking C of the Heysel complex, but it has no room for an athletics track.

The new sports park will not fit the bill either, Dineur said. The event attracts a capacity crowd of around 50,000 at the Roi Baudouin stadium; the 5,000 seats in the new park would be far too few.

Bruzz reports having seen an alternative plan, contained in a study commissioned by Brussels finance minister Guy Vanhengel, which proposes a much larger stadium with 23,000 places. The Neo board’s decision to back the smaller sports park would appear to have wiped Vanhengel’s study from the table, the paper concludes.

“We are always hearing contradictory declarations, and nobody knows what the real story is,” said Wilfried Meert, the former sports writer who now runs the Memorial. “It’s always a question of short-term planning. Nobody seems to have a long-term vision, or to care about developing one. We will do what we always do: we will wait.”

Photo: The men’s 200m at last year’s Memorial. Filip Bossuyt/Wikimedia