When I first heard last December that the Elán athletics hall was closing, I wasn’t sad or angry. I was convinced that the news could not be true.
Why?
In recent years, thanks to Ján Volek, Slovak athletics experienced historic indoor successes, and after each of them there was an appeal that a single athletics hall is not enough for Slovakia. “If we want to raise more European indoor champions, there must be more similar sports grounds,” I listened.
“I guess the competent people would not allow the last athletics hall with international parameters that we have in Slovakia to fall down,” I said to myself. “And even if there was a threat, there is still a state or a capital city that must be interested in preventing such a situation.”
I was wrong.
The oval, on which I ran my first athletics race in 2007 and won the Slovak championship for the first time in 2019, will be dismantled in a few days to make room for another sport. The Elán Hall will be replaced by the National Padel Center.
The fact that the man who built and improved it in the 1990s, who has supported sports and athletics for decades and is also the vice-president of the Slovak Athletics Association – former athlete, coach and now sports entrepreneur Ladislav Asványi – is responsible for the sale of the hall can sound even more surprising.
Why did he make this decision?
In the interview, Asványi explains that the hall was a loss and he can no longer fight in conditions that he considers discriminatory. He mainly addresses the reproaches to the leadership of Bratislava. He claims that he repeatedly asked the city for sports support or tax relief for sports facilities, but if he received an answer, it was rejected each time.
He did not go even when he wanted to donate the hall to the city (Bratislava would pay for the land under the hall), and the state institutions were not interested in the purchase either. Therefore, he sold the land with the hall to another business company.
The City of Bratislava responded in response that it did not receive additional necessary documents for the purchase offer, but admits that in the current situation it would be difficult to find money for the purchase.
Four times more for the sports field
The athletics hall was built on Pasienky in Bratislava during communism, it only had a location in common with today’s hall. It was a 170-meter athletic oval that did not meet international standards, it was covered with an inflatable film.
After the regime change, the hall came under the control of the Slovak Association of Physical Culture (SZTK), which received a grant of 10 million crowns for the construction of a new hall. However, the money was not enough for completion, only a skeleton remained, under which, according to Asványi, “homeless people slept”.
The businessman mentions that when he learned in the mid-1990s that SZTK was planning to sell the hall, he was eminently interested in the purchase. He had already invested his own money in the hall before, among other things he subsidized the dismantling of the original hall.
At the end of the 90s, Asványi’s company Športová hala Mladosť, s.r.o. was renting the hall, the so-called “inflatable” was replaced by a modern athletic hall with a 200-meter oval and facilities, as required by athletic standards.
The first race was held here in 1999. In 2007, Asványi bought the land under the hall, paying almost 54 million crowns for it. “It was the only option if I wanted peace from the developers,” he says. Later, he also bought land from the University of Economics on which part of the hall stood.
The businessman and official claims that the hall has never generated a substantial profit, but keeping it running in the black has become more challenging year by year. And in recent times, practically impossible.
According to Asványi, he was the turning point
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