The Road To The World Cup
Ends in C ELEBRATION
Celebration Bermudagrass to grass
five stadiums for 2014 World Cup
ROBERTO GURGEL & JUSTIN WALLACE
Celebration® Bermudagrass has been chosen to cover the pitch for five of the
stadiums for next year’s World Cup 2014 in Brazil. The five facilities, scattered
throughout the country, include the site of the finals; Estádio Maracanã in Rio de
Janeiro. Celebration was selected for its wear tolerance and recovery and also for
its ability to handle more shade than most bermuda varieties. Brazil-based
turfgrass grower Itograss provided the sod.
“Celebration is a great ally we can rely on to have a great playing surface, even in
adverse conditions with limited sunlight and intense use,” said Alexandre Vieira dos
Santos, part owner of Greenleaf Gramados, the company grassing the fields. “Celebration adapts and performs well under conditions where no one would expect to
have high quality fields. It was very evident that Celebration can maintain great
quality under heavy wear, recovering quickly from damage caused by excessive
games.”
Celebration has some of the quickest damage recovery of all bermudagrasses on
the market today. This will be important with the amount of games to be played
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on the fields leading up to the World Cup and
during the Cup itself. In fact, World Cup
championship stadium Maracanã already
hosted six matches in nine days during the
month of November. Even after those games,
the grass showed World Cup quality
standards required by FIFA, the international
soccer governing body.
Celebration will likely hang around for another massive event in 2016, as one or more of
the fields used for the 2014 World Cup will be
utilized for the Rio Summer Olympic Games.