BEIJING: Where Olympians ran, swam and slept, Chinese organisers see pop concerts, a public pool, football games and luxury apartments. Authorities are scrambling to make sure the 91,000-seat Bird’s Nest stadium and other venues are put to good use after the Olympics and September’s Paralympics.

They want to avoid the fate of other Olympic hosts that were left with empty, debt-burdened facilities. The NBA and private developers have been signed up to run stadiums and arenas.

The Water Cube swimming center, due to become a public pool, raised money by licensing its name for a bottled water brand. The Bird’s Nest is taking bids from companies for naming rights.

“We believe that post games and for a long period of time, these venues will be used pretty well,” Du Wei, vice president of the Beijing Olympic Economy Research Association told reporters. “The management companies will immediately open them up for public use.”

Beijing built 12 permanent and eight temporary new venues and refurbished 11 others at a cost of US$ 1.9 billion, according to the city government.

The Bird’s Nest will be the highest-profile test case for the city’s ability to make them financially viable.

It has the advantage that it is the first big, modern stadium in a city where the main venue for rock concerts and sports has been the drab Workers Stadium, a 58,000-seat hulk built in 1959.

But the new facility’s huge size and potentially high user fees could put it beyond the reach of many events. The stadium’s deputy general manager, Zhang Hengli told a newspaper it could take 30 years for the Bird’s Nest to repay its US$220 million cost.

Zhang said it needs at least $19 million in annual revenue to cover maintenance and debt payments. Beijing is relying in part on a timeworn strategy of forcing state companies to share the cost of public facilities.

CITIC Group, a government-owned investment company, put up 48 percent of the money to build the Bird’s Nest and the CITIC-owned Beijing Guoan football club will make the stadium its home field.

Zhang declined to discuss naming rights but according to media reports as many as seven companies are bidding. It said they include non-Chinese bidders, though attaching a foreign brand name to a national symbol that appears on China’s 10-yuan note might be judged politically unacceptable.

The Water Cube was paid for by donations from ethnic Chinese abroad, making it cheaper to convert to public use. But in a city where the average income per person is $4,100 a year, managers say ticket prices will be kept low, which leaves less for upkeep of its pool and its futuristic bubble-wrap exterior.

It raised money by licensing its name for use on swimsuits and on bottled water made from Canadian icebergs.

Athlete housing was designed from the start as luxury apartments, with swimming pools, tennis courts, coffee shops and shopping. Chinese media say units sold out ahead of the games for prices of $2,900-$4,400 per square metre, high even for Beijing’s booming real estate market.