London, hosts of this year's Paralympic Games, has submitted a formal bid for the 2017 IPC World Championships, the city's mayor Boris Johnson announced on Wednesday. Johnson said the success of the Games, hailed as the biggest and most high-profile in Paralympic history with 2.7 million tickets sold and involving more than 160 countries, showed there was a "huge appetite" for para-sport in Britain.
"The 2017 IPC World Championships present a fantastic opportunity for us to build on that phenomenal surge of enthusiasm and welcome back some of the world's greatest sportsmen and women to the Olympic Stadium," he added in an emailed statement. "Securing the championships would not only reinforce London's reputation as the world's leading sporting city, it would bring a vital multi-million pound boost to the capital's economy, creating jobs and driving growth in east London."
If successful, the championships, which were last held in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2011, would take place in July 2017, a month before the non-disabled World Athletics Championships, the statement said. Hosting the event would cost an estimated 8.6 million pounds (10.8 million euros, $13.7 million), with the majority of the outlay recouped through sponsorship and ticket sales, it added. The chairman of governing body UK Athletics Ed Warner, who also sits on the IPC's athletics sports technical committee, said the Paralympics had shown Britain's appetite for elite disability sport and London's ability to host such a major event.
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