Velodrome Appears Doomed
Soccer 1, Cycling 0.
That isn’t a matchup Galaxy officials wanted splashed across any Southland marquee, and it certainly isn’t a scoreline Olympic Velodrome officials wished to see anywhere at any time, but in the very real contest for prime real estate on the Cal State Dominguez Hills campus, that is how it stands.
Fighting to preserve the velodrome from the bulldozers that would raze the facility in order to create a 30,000-seat stadium for the Galaxy, the Southern California Velodrome Assn. suffered a sizable setback last week when the university canceled its operating contract with the SCVA--in effect, evicting the organization from the campus.
The decision calls for the SCVA to vacate the premises no later than Sept. 15, voiding the final two years of the five-year operating agreement the SCVA signed with the university in 1998.
It also signals the university’s intent to move forward with its soccer stadium project, which, in its fullest form, would also include a permanent training center for the U.S. national men’s and women’s soccer teams.
At the expense, apparently, of a 5,000-seat competitive cycling facility built specifically for use during the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.
“The velodrome has never plugged in, really, to the academic structure of this campus, as we’ve tried to operate it for the last 16 years,” said George Pardon, Cal State Dominguez Hills vice president of administration and finance.
“We just haven’t been able to demonstrate that there’s enough of a rationale [to continue with the velodrome]. When we look at building the stadium on the campus, especially with the project and the partnership with the U.S. Soccer Federation, plus having the major venue of a Major League Soccer team on the campus, it’s a real positive for the university. . . .
“It builds a stadium that we can use for commencement activities, we can use it for our own soccer programs. It builds an additional 2,500 parking spaces on the campus that we’ll be able to use as the university grows. If we attain the partnership with the U.S. Soccer Federation, they are going to improve our track, our gym and a number of other athletic venues on this campus that we can’t afford to put money into.
“In that context, it’s a much better fit. Whereas the velodrome is a very specialized [venue] that has never achieved substantial popularity. It’s competitive cycling. It’s not cycling like the Tour de France.”
Pardon also cited several “concerns” about the SCVA’s operation of the velodrome, contributing to the eviction notice. According to Pardon, the university’s contract with the SCVA gives the school the authority to cancel the agreement at any time with a 30-day notice.
“So we’ve given them till the middle of September in order to make sure that they do have an opportunity to reschedule activities or at least work through the activities they currently have scheduled,” he said.
Steve Meiche, SCVA president, accused the university of ambushing his organization with the notice and disputed the contention that his organization had mishandled running the velodrome.
“George Pardon has made the statement that there were ‘operational problems,’ ” Meiche said. “We’ve never had anything documented. We’ve never been reprimanded by them, we’ve never been put on notice. We’ve never had any problems brought to our attention from them.
“I mean, we’ve had some minor stuff about parking and little things like that we made some adjustments on. But that’s it.”
Pardon said the university had concerns over a fight between a coach and a cyclist’s father that broke out in the velodrome last year as well as the SCVA scheduling non-cycling events without university approval.
The fight, Pardon said, “brought some negative publicity to the venue . . . which wasn’t a positive situation for us.”
The non-cycling activities, he said, included a photo shoot for a car magazine inside the velodrome and a planned Fourth of July fund-raising fireworks show, since canceled when the sponsor of the event backed out over concerns about the velodrome’s future.
“Those are two I just happened to stumble on,” Pardon said. “How many have taken place without our knowledge already? We’re concerned from an overall liability perspective.
“What we have found, from our observation, is the fact that they’re running into the same issues that we ran into as we tried to operate the velodrome. And that is there is not enough demand from the cycling environment to support the operation of the velodrome, and they’ve had to pursue non-cycling activities to support it.
“If that’s what’s going to happen, we would prefer, in the event that we retain the velodrome, to run it ourselves. . . . So while, obviously, the Velodrome Assn. has tied some of these issues to the Galaxy, we have had issues with them for the last year and a half. And they’ve just mounted up sufficiently enough that we had been talking about that even before the Galaxy discussions.”
Meiche said the SCVA has hired an attorney “to tell us what our options are” and plans to exercise the clause in the contract that calls for disagreements to be settled through arbitration.
“And then we’re going to continue lobbying political support [against] this Galaxy thing,” Meiche said. “It would enhance [the Galaxy’s] facility--and, of course, it would enhance our operation--if they continued through with their plans to build a soccer stadium, but either kept the velodrome there or built us a new one.”
Construction for a new velodrome, Meiche estimated, would cost between $800,000 and $1.3 million.
And this would come out of the Galaxy’s pocket?
Sergio del Prado, Galaxy vice president of business operations, laughed at the notion.
“It’s not us tearing it down,” del Prado said. “I don’t know how much sense economically it makes for us to do anything like that. If the velodrome was profitable, it probably would still be viable and we’d be looking somewhere else.
“It’s not the Galaxy against the velodrome. It’s not soccer against cycling. It’s more just what’s the best use for the area.”
Pardon said the university would prefer not building the soccer complex around the velodrome because the cycling facility is “located on the ideal site for the stadium, because it’s situated farthest from the residential community. That’s obviously a real issue for us--to provide adequate access into the campus and provide good circulation and making sure from a noise issue that that venue is as far away from the residential areas as possible.”
The Olympic Velodrome is one of three competitive cycling tracks in Southern California. San Diego and Encino also have velodrome tracks, but Meiche said the Encino velodrome, constructed in 1963, would have to be “completely rebuilt” to satisfy current standards for international-level competition.
The Galaxy and Cal State Dominguez Hills have until June 30 to submit a national training center bid proposal to U.S. Soccer. Originally, the deadline was Sunday, but the federation granted an extension, according to Pardon, “to give us some breathing room. One of the issues, probably, was that we weren’t far enough in our proposals to make any firm agreement at this point.”
Pardon said the university also needed approval from the California State University board of trustees before moving forward on the project. The proposed soccer complex, he said, is on the agenda for the board’s next meeting on May 9.
