After years of speculation, City Hall have revealed plans for the second stage of Skra’s revival…
After years of speculation, City Hall have revealed plans for the second stage of Skra’s revival…
Seen as a rotting relic of Poland’s sporting past, one of the city’s most iconic stadiums is to gain a second lease of life after City Hall unveiled plans for the second stage of its regeneration.
Announced yesterday following a competitive process, the stadium is to be transformed into a 25-seater covered athletics arena. In addition, a 7,000 capacity sports hall will be built primarily for basketball and volleyball.
“I am glad that we are taking another step in this long march, which will culminate in the new and beautiful Skra stadium,” said Tomasz Majewski, vice-president of the Polish Athletics Association.
“We have chosen the most optimal project, both for Varsovians and athletes,” he continued. “I hope that in a few years we will meet at the new athletics stadium.”
The Mayor, Rafał Trzaskowski, was also present at the press briefing held to announce the winning bid to redevelop the area: “Our city needs modern sports infrastructure – an athletics stadium and a hall that will be home to Warsaw sports and will serve the capital’s basketball and volleyball teams,” he said.
“We will also make sure that this sports complex is as green as possible,” he added.
Set in the top corner of Warsaw’s Ochota district, Skra had first been earmarked to become a sports complex by the city’s visionary mayor, Stefan Starzyński. The outbreak of WWII saw those plans shelved, and for the duration of the occupation the grounds served as the home of a Nazi anti-aircraft battery.
Despite sustaining heavy damage towards the end of the war, peacetime saw the plot swiftly repurposed as a speedway track.
But whilst speedway was to take off in many parts of Poland, the Warsaw public never truly warmed to the sport; aware of this flagging interest, city authorities recruited Jerzy Wasilewski and Mikołaj Kokozow to design an athletics stadium.
Holding 35,000 spectators, this horseshoe-shaped arena was officially inaugurated in 1953 and was hailed as the most modern sports facility in the nation.
Over the following decades it became central to Polish Olympic hopes, with a fleet of sporting legends all training here – among them, Władysław Kozakiewicz, a pole vaulter that hit international headlines during the 1982 Olympics when he made an ‘up yours’ gesture to a hostile Moscow crowd.
But dark days were around the corner. When Communism crumbled the Skra stadium lost its government funding and rapidly slid into decline. Little more than a concrete ruin, the sporting media were outraged after learning that “the greatest hammer thrower of all time”, Anita Włodarczyk, was training in such dismal conditions.
