On 10th of December 2025, a marvel for sports lover, especially running, was erased in Bacau, Romania: Athletic Park. At a first glance, when explored in the Christmas period, it looks to worth it, and seems a very good sports facility for all people from the town. However, I like to put things in a broader context when I analyze a public investment, because, in the end, it concerns all tax payers.
Odense, Denmark, model for athletic park Bacau
The model taken is a similar facility from Odense, Denmark, built in 2013, and named Athletics Exploratorium. The inspiration piece really seems to be genuine, so I’ll follow a complex path to put in place everything together and, in the end, to validate the complete picture of Athletic Park. One point, at the start, to mention, for those who maybe know, and especially for those who don’t, Odense, the location of the inspiration, is the home town of the famous Hans Christian Andersen, one of the most well know fairy tale writers. It is important for the context.
First problem: pedestrians need to be creative to reach the athletic park
12 years later, Bacau has a similar facility. Going there on a very cold winter day, with a thin but crisp layer of snow & ice on the track, can be tricky. The first major surprise is the complicated availability for pedestrians. I had an assumption, but the reality confirmed my fear. Normally, Google Maps shows you a path from the local railway station, on top of the train lines, an old pedestrian walk I knew for some time. The problem with it: sealed, seems not to be functional. Alternative? An almost 2 kilometers extension of my “warm-up”.
A relevant later edit here tells that you can potentially go below the railway, starting from inside the train station, but since I don’t live in Bacau, and Google didn’t show that passage, I wasn’t thinking to try it out, so I will update at a later stage this option, if it really is what I think. Regardless, it is even less relevant if you are not a local, because you can’t guess that a messy underground facility can lead you there, since the Internet doesn’t help.
Not even Google knows how to reach the athletic park by foot…
Initially, I was thinking maybe I am stupid, maybe I couldn’t see the correct path, or find the reason for the closure. Since nothing can be found on-line about this, and neither could the mighty Google identify the breach, I’m just minding my own business, and skip the inconvenience. At some point, an important passage passes under the train lines, but as I was assuming, it was made only for cars. Nobody thought that people might need an opportunity to cross by foot on the other side of the town. It is called “Romanian job”! 🙂 I keep it parallel with the train track, and prepare for a total of almost 5 kilometers, instead of 2.8, because… why not?
Cross the railway!
Suddenly, a cross road catches my eye, even though, on the other side there is no side walk. Nono, but there are some stairs who help you cross the… railroads directly! Is that even legal in 2025?! In a country where trains can speed, probably not, but since Romanian trains very rare can jump above 100 kilometers / hour, it is OK. I cross that and skip almost one additional kilometer. Basically, now I go back from where I came, on the other side of the railway. That is the stupid fact for somebody coming from the north / central part of the town.
How can you held people accountable?
Now, I need to run on the bike route, because there is none for pedestrians, of course. In that place, you don’t have too many reasons to walk anyway, honestly speaking. The view, the landscape, transforms the lack of side walk the problem. In the end, after slightly more than 4 kilometers I make it in front of the facility. First impression, odd: I knew I should register, and that the schedule is 06:00 – 22:00, but the problem is that I didn’t see any blockage in case somebody doesn’t want to provide his data. I did, of course, but I could have not done it, and I am not sure who could challenge me…
Ice and snow layered on the track from the athletic park Bacau
It is true that there seem to be at least one guard patrolling the facility, but that guy for sure can’t react in any meaningful way if somebody up to no good, does something and then runs aways, without providing any data… I think this is a big problem, that the local authorities should somehow solve, maybe with a gate, or something. Because otherwise, things can be in vain, like it often happens in Romania. At last, I enter the field, and notice the thin crisp soft snow + ice on track. It is quite understandable, I don’t have the pretention that people should clean it right away, especially in this period, and especially since only myself and two other dudes were running.
The tracks seem good, but quite early to state a verdict
The rest of people were mainly family with children, maybe who live close by, and dealt with this athletic park as a plain park… Nothing necessary wrong. The quality of the facility, in general, seems good, but hard to evaluate the track itself, since the weather was not proper, and nor were my shoes… The only certainty is that the Athletic Park is very though to access by foot, and that the penitentiary is the closest neighbor, apart from the railway. 🙂 I run a couple of kilometers, both on the 400 meters plain classic track, but also on the 309 meters elevated one. The first impression decent, and I promise to come back with an update after a better session, on a better time of the year, maybe around April – May the earliest.
Who paid, who will pay?
Hoping to see the facility in the same apparent good shape in four-five years from now, I can’t jump again back to Odense, where the source of inspiration lays. As you can see in the picture below, it really looks very good, and it is understandable why the desire to replicate this. The biggest problem I see: the cost. In theory, this is not something I am very interested in, because I know the answers before asking the questions, but I saw some reactions of the fact that the CJ (county council) contributed with 95% and the townhall with 5%, money, allegedly, deductible from European funds. Will that be? Have no clue, maybe.
16 million EUR for Athletic Park Bacau vs. 16 million DKK for Athletics Exploratorium
The biggest point is the total sum, vehiculated from the beginning (at the end, usually it is even bigger): more than 16 million EUR (the attached states 14,5 million, have no clue why, because dividing the 79,7 lei anywhere between 4.95 and 5.10, the EUR price is between 15.5M and 16+ EUR)! It is always hard to make a fair evaluation / conclusion of its fairness, so then I tried to look into the price paid by the Danish builders. It is astonishing: 12 million DKK. This means around 1,8 million EUR!!! If accurate, almost seven time less!!! The project looks similar, with nothing missing in Odense, and similar surface of around 16,000 – 20,000 square meters. The official data from 2023, in Bacau shows in theory a combined 49,000 square meters! Actually, in a more recent document, all project is scaled at around 100,000 m2! I don’t see such a big difference when checking the pictures, because it clearly means the Bacau facility (below, just a project) is almost 2.5 bigger, or even 5 times bogger than the one in Odense… Maybe I don’t understand how to read all the numbers, but the cost really is 79,7 million LEI vs. 12 million Danish Kroner.
In any way, even being 2.5 or 5 times larger, if the 14,5M+ EUR look even too large (79,7M lei, to be more specific). 🙂 Maybe if we consider 5 x 2,15M this can be more acceptable, and unquestionable… Maybe just an impression, let’s be positive! Until when? Until we remember where the place is, and where could it had been! Huh? Right: Bacau actually has an almost deserted and far bigger sports complex in about the city center, left to rot for more than 20 years. With an abandoned stadium and many other facilities on a field which could have been easily used for this project, if dealt with correct. In the end, maybe, at some point, somebody will clarify the apparent huge price difference. 🙂 And hopefully, I won’t see / here that inflation kicked in, or that it is normal to be that much more expensive in Romania, comparing to Denmark. Can it, be, maybe, a typo, and then the 79,7M is only 7,97? Maybe it is 8 million lei, though. In any case, let’s divert out attention again to the abandoned place from very near the city center.
Pure reality
Look, I am not interested what the reason is for the abandoned lot visible below. As a Romanian citizen, though, I would like to see this town growing, not falling apart like it does for more than 30 years, and a beautiful patch of sport tracks outside the means of reach cannot compensate with the devastating image of the park that might not be renovated in the end at all, as many projects skip the deadline by years… And having the former sports park being left abandoned for quarter a century at least, it is not something helping even more. This is the reality. More ironic is that the Athletic Exploratorium in Odense is in the service of the local University, while the deserted place in Bacau is located exactly between the two Universities of the town.
Inspiration alert!
Good to have the first athletic park in Romania, like in Denmark. But the resemblance with Odense, might be cut only on the shape of a pure fairy tale, because even if I’ve never been to Odense, in Kolding, Vejle, and Copenhagen, you can’t see such a vast space in the city center abandoned, especially a surface that once represented the sports facility of the city… And my comments are especially important because the new national marathon record holder, after almost 50 years, trains in the town, so I guess an efficient facility can serve not only as a key bedrock for training, but as a root for inspiration for many young talented athletes! We can make up any story here, but I am not sure if we ever can really compete to Hans Christian Andersen’s magnificent fairy tales…
Some photo source: keingart.com