R30 MILLION ROOF FOR CAPE TOWN STADIUM TO HOST UFC
If everything goes to plan, Cape Town will be the first African city to host an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event.
The only thing standing in the way is a roof which will cost around R30 million.
Cape Town Mayor Gordon Hill-Lewis said the City is looking into the possibility of adding a temporary roof structure over Cape Town Stadium to host the inaugural UFC Africa event. The date for the event hasn’t been announced yet.
The possibility of the fight is all due to South African world champion Dricus du Plessis beating Nigeria’s Israel Adesanya at UFC 305 in Perth, Australia in August.
During the build-up to the fight, UFC president Dana White said: “If Dricus beats Izzy and brings that belt back to South Africa, we will do an event there.”
During an interview on CapeTalk, Hill-Lewis said the other option is the Cape Town International Convention Centre. Even though the Convention Centre is enclosed, it offers a smaller seating capacity.
“Our engineering teams have already come up with four options, actually all of which work, but work at different costs and have different pros and cons and have different capacities inside the stadium and so on.”
“All of them would be temporary roofs and not permanent. But a couple of the options would allow us to erect, take down, and erect the roof for future events as well.”
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