A rendering of the master plan for Singapore Sports Hub.
It’s been on the drawing board for more than 14 years and, beginning in May, the 12 facilities that make up the 3.75-million-sq.-ft. Singapore Sports Hub in Kallange will open for business. The OCBC Aquatic Centre, an area for water sports, and the Singapore Sports Museum and Singapore Sports Library will be among the first facilities rolled out during a phased opening. During the initial weeks, the venues will be open solely to National Sports Associations, which will later be training in the facilities on a daily basis.
“We’re going to give them the first opportunity to come into the facilities and really run them through their paces,” said Mark Collins, managing director of Singapore Sports Hub for Global Spectrum. “That way they can give us feedback and it gives us a chance to fix anything that doesn’t work exactly the way it’s intended to before the public comes in.”
After the 6,000-capacity OCBC Aquatic Centre opens in mid-May, the venues at Singapore Sports Hub will open steadily through June. Other facilities that make up Singapore Sports Hub include the 3,000-capacity OCBC Arena; the Water Sports Centre featuring dragon boating, kayaking and canoeing; a 9,600-sq.-ft. Sports Promenade with recreational space; other sports and lifestyle areas.
“The Sports Hub will have everyday sporting facilities that will be open to the public such as fitness corners, running and biking circuits, basketball hard courts, a climbing wall and much more,” said Philippe Collin Delavaud, CEO of SportsHub Private Limited. “There will also be lifestyle facilities such as a shopping mall, restaurants beside the waterfront and even a sports library and museum for people to enjoy.”
The jewels of the space will be the iconic Singapore Indoor Stadium, which underwent extensive upgrades and renovations last year after being built in 1989, and the new National Stadium with its retractable roof.
The entire project, designed by Arup out of London with local affiliate DP Architects, cost in excess of $1 billion.
POINT OF PRIDE
The first large event at the 55,000-seat National Stadium is set for June 28 with the Singapore Chinese Orchestra presenting its largest show ever, a 4,000-member concert called Our People, Our Music 2014. The event will not only serve to kick off entertainment at the facility, it will also attempt to break the Guinness World Record and the Singapore Book of Records for the largest erhu ensemble (pronounced Are Who and referring to a Chinese fiddle) and the largest Chinese drum ensemble.
“The Sports Hub and National Stadium are intended to stir up the pride of Singaporeans and really get emotional juices flowing, and this event will do just that,” said Collins.
Other upcoming events include the SEA Swimming Championships at OCBC Aquatic Centre, June 14-26; Taylor Swift’s Red tour at Singapore Indoor Stadium, June 12; and World Club 10s Rugby at National Stadium, June 21-22.
The Southeast Asian Games in June 2015 will be considered the official ‘opening’ of the facility, though it will have been used for events for a year. It will be the first major multisport competition to come to Sports Hub.
There were a few mandates laid out in Global Spectrum’s 25-year contract with SportsHub Pte Ltd to operate the facilities. One included that eight hours of the 16 hours the facilities are open each day are devoted to elite athlete training. Another mandate calls for messaging, affordability and programming such that local Singaporeans feel ownership.
“It’s so important to make these facilities open, affordable, appealing and available to Singaporeans in order to engage them in ownership,” Collins added.
Another mandate dictates that for every one large, commercial event, Sports Hub must host four community events, including working with the Minister of Education to put on youth events and hosting a 45-day National Day Celebration at National Stadium four out of every five years. The government has the ability to activate use of the stadium, during which they aren’t charged rent, but do pay expenses.
“In any other stadium in the world, it would be like a dark day,” said Collins. “This way, even though those ‘dark days’ don’t generate revenue in rent, it keeps activity going on at Sports Hub so we become a 365-day activation for something.”
THE LONG GAME
Global Spectrum is an equity shareholder in SportsHub Private Limited, the entity that is contracted with the Singapore Government for 25 years to design, build and operate Sports Hub. Having such a long contract allows for Global Spectrum to invest in programming and “not always look for those quick-hits, one-offs that we know are commercial and turn our backs on everything else,” said Collins.
For certain events, the company is willing to take a loss the first few years in order to establish the properties.
Sports Hub is also working with the local rugby union to make Singapore the hub of Asian rugby, and is looking to join the union in some major bids to get an HSBC Sevens World Series rugby event or even a tenant team.
“We’re working with them on a business model where we actually take risk with the promoter, which is not really a business model we subscribe to in most of our facilities,” said Collins. “But we’re willing to take this risk to build the event, the programming and the value of programming, because we think of the long-term play here.”
Another tenet of Global Spectrum’s contract gives them the ability to sell naming rights, except for National Stadium and Singapore Indoor Stadium.
Thus far, the largest contract has been with OCBC, a bank group in Singapore. The 15-year, nearly $40-million contract provides the company with naming rights to the multi-purpose indoor arena and aquatic center, as well as club lounges at the north and south wings of National Stadium and the VIP lounge in Singapore Indoor Stadium. Sports Hub has also reached an in-principle agreement with OCBC Bank’s insurance subsidiary, Great Eastern Holdings.
GETTING TO THIS POINT
With Sports Hub’s opening just around the corner, it’s easy for forget the long journey it took to get here.
The government established a steering committee task force in 2001 to consider how they were going to replace their national stadium and improve the existing infrastructure of sports facilities in Singapore. Many years, commissioned reports and RFPs later, three equity shareholders (InfraRed Capital Partners, Dragages Singapore, and DTZ) came on in July 2006, with Global Spectrum Asia coming in as the fourth and final equity shareholder that October.
Check out the other stories in the Singapore Sports Hub spotlight for more information about the facts and figures of the renovation, as well as the established brands for both ticketing and concessions solutions.
Interviewed for this story: Mark Collins and Philippe Delavaud, +65 6340 9243