Its brown brickwork is handsome and its scale is intimate.
And it is the oldest Olympic stadium still in use – for events ranging from local school competitions all the way up to the Diamond League.
Lyden describes being among the 14,000-capacity crowd watching Usain Bolt win the 200m at a Diamond League meeting in July last year. It was so quiet, she says, “you could hear Bolt breathe”.
After much fiddling with keys, she opens the door and I am allowed to step on to her office balcony, with a view over the entire track.
“This is where I can speak to my people,” she says, with a twinkle. “No, but the architect: he wasn’t just creating a stadium. He was creating a dream.”
The reality was impressive enough. The Stockholm stadium saw 83 world records set at the 1912 Olympics. Perhaps the most glittering was that set by an 18-year-old American, Donald F. Lippincott.
This was how one American “One Cent” newspaper reported his achievement at the time: “LIPPINCOTT, PENN ATHLETE, CREATES WORLD’S RECORD. Stockholm, July 6. At the opening day’s events of the Olympic games Donald F. Lippincott of the University of Pennsylvania hung up a new world’s record for the 100 metres in heat 16, when he ran the distance in the marvellous time of 10 3-5 seconds.”
These days, Donald Lippincott III remembers his grandfather as “a commanding presence, but not overbearing”. A photograph of the time shows a bulky 18-year-old, with the slight slouch of a teenager unused to the attention.
