Zeidler Miklós: Sporting Spaces - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)

Yet soon enough, the stadium was its old self again. The races drew crowds larger than ever, but there were also labour meetings, figure skating events, and two college world championships held here. There were two minor reconstruction jobs carried out after the war, and before the 1954 Universiade, the concrete of the track was broken up, the sagging curves filled up and the tilting of the straights adjusted. It was then that the Millenary was given its current appearance: the length of the track was reduced to 412 metres, the curves were tilted at an angle of 36.6, the straights at 11.6 degrees. The athletics and football fields were eliminated, but the facility was equipped with a new lighting system: twin lights suspended on twenty-six poles shed their light on night events.

Unfortunately, the irregular length of the track kept world events away from the Millenary. From the early seventies, the stiff races of the World Cups drew sizeable crowds to the sides of the track that had been covered with a new cement paving in 1974. Soon, however, the track races, too, went the way of the athletics events and ball games. Television and other forms of entertainment have stolen the spectators once crowding the terraces of the Millenary, which is one of the reasons for the crisis cycling as a competitive sport struggles with to this day in Hungary. The covered grandstand and the dressing-room building of the Millenary were renewed in honour of the facility’s centenary, which is also marked by a historical sports photo exhibition upstairs.

The National Sports Hall

(No. 3 Istuánmezei út, district XIV)

The idea of constructing a covered sports hall in the capital city had been a major preoccupation for sport experts ever since the 1920s. However, conflicting interests and conceptions as well as insufficient funding prevented the idea from taking shape for two decades. According to fine and ambitious plans prepared by the late thirties, a complex of three buildings should have been erected in the area bordered by the curve of the Aréna (today’s Dózsa György) út and Istvánmezei út.

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