King Baudouin Stadium
sports stadium in Laeken, Brussels, Belgium
The King Baudouin Stadium (French: Stade Roi Baudouin [stad ʁwa bodwɛ̃]; Dutch: Koning Boudewijnstadion [ˌkoːnɪŋ ˈbʌudəʋɛinˌstaːdijɔn]) is a multi-use stadium in Brussels, Belgium. Located in the north-western district of the City of Brussels, it was built to embellish the Heysel/Heizel Plateau in view of the 1935 Brussels International Exposition. It was inaugurated on 23 August 1930, with Crown Prince Leopold attending the opening ceremony. The stadium hosted 70,000 at the time. Its name honours King Baudouin, Leopold's successor as King of the Belgians from 1951 to his death in 1993.
The stadium is located at 135/2, avenue de Marathon/Marathonlaan, on the border of the Bruparck entertainment park (with the Atomium, Mini-Europe miniature park and Kinepolis cinema).
History
Early history
The first version of the King Baudouin Stadium was built in 1929–30 by the architect Joseph Van Neck, also chief architect of the 1935 Brussels International Exposition, in a classical modernist style. Its original name was the Jubilee Stadium (French: Stade du Centenaire, Dutch: Jubelstadion) because it was inaugurated as part of the centenary celebrations of the Belgian Revolution, with an unofficial Belgium–Netherlands football match.
In 1946, the stadium was stripped of the wood of its cycling track, and was renamed the Heysel Stadium (French: Stade du Heysel, Dutch: Heizelstadion), after the neighbourhood in which it is located. In 1971, a tartan track was installed allowing the organisation of athletics competitions.
“King Baudouin Stadium” enters the record as sports stadium in Laeken, Brussels, Belgium. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what King, Baudouin and Stadium can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “King Baudouin Stadium” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.