The cycling supremo, who was speaking during the London Assembly's Economy, Culture and Sport Committee's grilling of sports chiefs on the legacy plans for Olympic venues, launched a damning attack on the two venues, saying: "You will never make, in my opinion, any business case for either of those to be a successful venue.

"If you build a main Stadium knowing you will have to knock all the majority of it down afterwards, you've made a mistake.

"And I think if you spend £300 million ($483 million) on a swimming pool that's too much."

During the Committee questioning, concerns were also raised about the lack of profitability of many the Olympic venues.

Mark Sessnan, the managing director of social enterprise GLL, said that the only venue which could realistically make a profit was the Handball Arena (pictured), which will become a multi-sport venue after 2012.


Mark Bradley of the Fan Experience Company placed the blame for this situation on deep rooted issues across British sporting culture.

"There is a culture in the UK that many running venues believe their product is the sport," he said.

"The sport that the venue is designed for is the starting point.

"I don't suggest football or rugby clubs we work with abandon the sport, but to grow revenues they need to think differently about what they offer.

"For example when you leave Wembley Stadium, you go onto an empty concourse, not a shop where you can spend some money, which sums up our problem.

"We have hundreds of thousands attending sports events but their feedback is characterised by a lack of engagement.

"It means we have people going once - the experience isn't enough to get the grandson to go back again.

"In football in the lower levels, the perception is it is closed for business, whereas Major League Baseball deconstructed the sport to make it more engaging.

"There is not a single venue in the UK which is maximising what it could achieve."

Attention was paid to the failure of the National Hockey Centre in Milton Keynes, built in the 1990s and which was the home of English Hockey until 2003, and last year was demolished.

The Committee participants were keen to stress the importance of finding a variety of uses for the venues outside of their primary purposes as the homes of particular sports.

Only that way could they ensure the success of the respective facilities in the long term, something Professor Terry Stevens, the managing director of Stevens and Associates, was keen to emphasise: "It's about creative, imaginative ways of looking at these spaces and achieving a balance between primary requirements and other uses."

King was also keen to stress that the Olympic Park Legacy Company, charged with ensuring the success of the 2012 venues long term, learn the lessons of Sydney 2000.

"In Sydney they gave each venue a different operator and they compete against each other so that some days you can't get on the trains and other days there is no one on the park at all," he said.

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