London, hosts of this year’s Paralympic Games, has submitted a formal bid for the 2017 IPC World Championships, the city’s mayor Boris Johnson announced.
Johnson said the success of the Games, hailed as the biggest and most high-profile in Paralympic history with 2.7 million tickets sold and involving more than 160 countries, showed there was a “huge appetite” for para-sport in Britain.
“The 2017 IPC World Championships present a fantastic opportunity for us to build on that phenomenal surge of enthusiasm and welcome back some of the world’s greatest sportsmen and women to the Olympic Stadium,” he added in an emailed statement.
“Securing the championships would not only reinforce London’s reputation as the world’s leading sporting city, it would bring a vital multi-million pound boost to the capital’s economy, creating jobs and driving growth in east London.”
If successful, the championships, which were last held in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2011, would take place in July 2017, a month before the non-disabled World Athletics Championships, the statement said.
Hosting the event would cost an estimated £8.6 million (€10.8 million), with the majority of the outlay recouped through sponsorship and ticket sales, it added.
The chairman of governing body UK Athletics Ed Warner, who also sits on the IPC’s athletics sports technical committee, said the Paralympics had shown Britain’s appetite for elite disability sport and London’s ability to host such a major event.
A successful bid for the British capital “would establish a new standard for the IPC World Athletics Championships against which all future editions would be measured,” he added.
International Paralympic Committee (IPC) spokesman Craig Spence said it was policy not to comment on how many bids had been received or from where but told AFP: “We welcome the bid. We had a great time in London and it was a very strong event.”
Britain is seeking to build on the popularity of this year’s Olympics and Paralympics, which notably saw success for home-grown athletes and led to hopes of a surge of interest in sport across the country.
The next major multi-sport event to come to the country will be the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Scotland, while England will also host the rugby union World Cup the following year.
The IPC Athletics World Championships are the largest single-sport competition for athletes with a disability and take place every two years. In Christchurch, more than 1,500 athletes from over 70 countries took part.