The training hall in the Olympic Ice Sports Center will become the home of action sports in Munich for five years. Children, teenagers and young adults should be able to practice disciplines that have previously had little space in the city: bouldering, trampoline, parkour or Ninja Warrior, a skill and endurance sport in which participants have to overcome various obstacles. The town hall majority of the Greens/Rose List and SPD/Volt want to decide on the renovation of the previous training hall in the sports committee on Wednesday. Operations are scheduled to start by the end of 2024 at the latest.
The city is reacting to the move of ice sports to the new private arena in the Olympic Park. This should take place in 2024. The halls should not be empty until a decision is made about the final use of the Olympic ice sports center.
The interim use of the training hall as an action sports center is the first step, the second is scheduled to take place at the end of the year. Then the supervisory board of the Olympiapark company should decide whether the ice rink, in which the EHC Red Bull Munich currently plays ice hockey with its professionals, should be used as an event hall, concert hall, multi-sports hall or as an indoor bike park. The so-called Socc Arena in the Ackermann tent will remain.
The Olympic Park has been attracting tens of thousands of fans every year since 2014 with the Munich Mash action sports festival. Now popular sports should also find a place there. “We are finally making progress with new offers for action sports. The temporary use in the Olympic Park is an ideal complement to the new action sports hall in Pasing, which is scheduled to open in 2025,” said Kathrin Abele, the SPD’s sports expert on the city council. According to her colleague Florian Schönemann from the Green Party, the offer is aimed “at all sports enthusiasts: from school classes to parents with children to club sports. And the whole thing is subsidized by the city of Munich so that the admission prices remain affordable.”
Skateboarders and BMX riders can stay in Pasing
The city originally wanted to build a large center for action sports in the Eggenfabrik in Pasing. For cost reasons, however, only a hall for skateboarders and BMX riders will initially be built there, which will cost twelve million euros. As an addition, the sports that have been postponed there can now move into the training hall of the ice sports center. The city will invest around 1.7 million euros in this. The action sports center will be operated by the Olympic Park Company, which can look for action sports partners. The prices should deliberately be kept low so that the offer reaches all sections of the population. According to the SPD, the city has rented 8,000 hours of ice per year in the new arena on the site of the former cycling stadium for ice skating as a popular sport.
The city has set the interim use of the Olympic ice sports center for five years. What will then happen on the site is still unclear. A new sports hall for up to 6,000 spectators is being discussed, but also a significantly larger multifunctional hall for concerts and congresses. With such planning, the Olympic Park could provide a counterpoint to the planned private arena at the airport for more than 20,000 visitors and prevent the impending migration of large shows from the city.