Town chief executive Simon Clegg has backed West Ham’s bid to move to the new Olympic Stadium after the 2012 Games. The Hammers hope to take over the stadium, reducing its capacity to 60,000 with athletics, cricket and other sporting and entertainment events also part of their plans.
Former British Olympic Association chief executive Clegg told the club site: "I've been in contact with West Ham and support their push to become anchor tenants of the stadium.
"The whole of the London bid was built around not creating white elephants, yet for the biggest stadium of all we have not been able to find a long-term tenant, a long-term solution to that problem.
"The current plan is to reduce the stadium down from 80,000 seats to 25,000 after the Games. That's fine but who is going to use a 25,000 stadium every week in this country?
"The bottom line is that we made a commitment during the bid phase to the IOC (International Olympic Committee) that we would retain an athletics track in legacy mode and that has to be delivered. A track has to remain at the stadium.
"What we hadn't done at that stage is think through what the long-term legacy was going to be for the stadium with the athletics track as an integral part of it.
"There are several national athletics tracks around the country and quite rightly UK Athletics want to spread their competitions around the country. They also have their National High Performance Centre down the road at Picketts Lock, so they could not become the sole anchor tenant for the stadium.
"Therefore it's going to have to be a shared facility and it seems to me that football is the primary user of large stadia in this country and with West Ham in need of a suitable facility and very local, that looks like a very good solution.
"While there may be a fixation in this country that we can't live with an athletics track around a football pitch, if you go on the continent that is a model that you frequently find, including at some of the biggest clubs in Europe.
"There are other options but I'm convinced that the best possible long-term solution and the least drain on the public purse is a football club, like West Ham, going in and operating as the anchor tenant."
Town face West Ham in a pre-season friendly at Portman Road on Saturday 31st July (KO 3pm).