Very great importance was attached to physical culture and sports in the USSR. Sports were promoted everywhere as much as possible – with the help of posters, television, newspapers and magazines. But even greater importance was attached to places for sports – football fields, skating rinks or ice arenas, sports complexes and much more.
The exact date of the start of construction work on this structure is unknown, but there are several unconfirmed data about it (to put it simply – myths) circulating in various types of media. Firstly, this is not an ice stadium or a palace – this abandoned sports complex received this name because of the proximity to a real working ice stadium, and to be objective, it is just a large open-air skating rink. Secondly, the sports complex, after its construction, was mainly intended for training of the Dynamo football club and was completely ready for use. At the time of freezing of the last stages of construction work, all equipment, furniture and sports equipment were delivered in full for installation and delivered to the complex’s warehouse.
To everything else, we can also add a well-known fact about this abandoned sports complex – it was built as an analogue of the Moscow CSKA athletics and football complex, only without a section for athletics. The building of the CSKA gymnasium was built in 1979 on the eve of the 1980 Olympics – it can be assumed that these 2 sports complexes were built at the same time. From 1977 to 1980, a large-scale reconstruction took place at the NSC Olimpiysky, but since this stadium did not have a roof to protect spectators and players from bad weather, it is quite likely that Soviet officials, in order to, as always, show the greatness of the USSR and not hit the dirt facing foreigners, they decided to build a backup option in the form of an indoor sports complex. And no wonder! After all, as a result, as part of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Kyiv, football matches took place between the teams of Algeria, Iraq, Spain, Costa Rica, East Germany, Syria and Finland.
But these are all events of bygone days… But what is happening with the sports complex-“ice stadium” now? The looters removed aluminum and other metal that could easily be cut down and taken away; even ceramic tiles were knocked off the walls and sound insulation was cut out… In the summer of 2017, news that was quite unsurprising for Kiev appeared – on the site of the complex they want to build another shopping and entertainment center “Yuzhny” “with a total area of 450,000 square meters. The developer promises that the shopping center will have a large sports area with an area of about 70,000 square meters with indoor basketball and hockey courts, and access to all this will be free. The start of construction work is announced for the end of 2017, the designer will be the company “Urban Experts & Leslie Jones Architecture” (known in Kyiv for the Ocean Plaza shopping center and the not yet opened Respublika shopping center). As of the beginning of 2018, work has not begun; the Yuzhny shopping center project is still not publicly available.
Where is the sports complex (“ice stadium”)?
Academician Glushkov Avenue, 7