Winter Olympics inspectors positive after Beijing visit

BEIJING — International Olympic Committee (IOC) inspectors left Beijing yesterday after offering praise for the Chinese capital’s bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics which, if successful, would make it the first city to hold both the Winter and Summer Games.

The inspectors’ departure followed a news conference at which Evaluation Commission chairman Alexander Zhukov affirmed Beijing’s embrace of the IOC’s goals for a more frugal, sustainable and athlete-centred games.

Beijing’s bid relies heavily on the experience and infrastructure gained from hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics, as well as expanding the appeal of winter sports in the world’s most populous nation.

“From this visit, we can see your Games in 2008 have left a profound legacy,” Mr Zhukov said. “We can also see the legacy of 2008 in the level of expertise and knowledge of the Beijing 2022 bid team.”

The city’s inspections and presentations appeared to go off without a hitch, although air pollution remained at high levels throughout the inspectors’ visit. The trip was a crucial test of Beijing’s status as the front-runner in the bid race against Almaty, Kazakhstan.

The IOC will select the host city on July 31 in Kuala Lumpur. Oslo and other global cities dropped out of the race after local opposition to the costs involved.

IOC inspectors visited sites in Beijing, as well as the Yanqing and Zhangjiakou ski areas north of the city. To further entice television audiences, some of these venues would lie beneath portions of the Great Wall of China.

While the venues’ distance from Beijing has been a concern, organisers say a high-speed rail line now under construction will reduce the current three-hour travel time to only 50 minutes.

Air pollution and a lack of natural snow have also been raised as issues surrounding the bid, although Beijing plans to tackle the problem by making snow, closing polluting industries and taking older vehicles off city roads. They say that would bring a 25 per cent reduction in the very small and extremely unhealthy PM2.5 pollutants under a five-year plan that began in 2013.

As they did in the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics, human rights groups have argued that the communist government’s restrictions on civil and political liberties make it an unfit candidate to host the games.

Pro-Tibetan and other groups say the IOC raised the bar for candidate cities by strengthening support for basic human rights in its Olympic Agenda 2020 adopted last year. Those groups have also called for Kazakhstan’s record to be scrutinised.

Following ballooning price tags, the IOC has made lowering costs a key criteria for prospective hosts. After a visit by inspectors to Almaty in February, Kazakh organisers announced venue changes they said would save more than US$500 million (S$686 million).

In all, Beijing plans to spend US$3.9 billion on infrastructure and operations, a tiny fraction of the US$51 billion spent by Russia on last year’s Sochi Games. That, however, does not include key infrastructure such as sports facilities and the rail line to ski areas that Beijing says will be built regardless of whether the bid is successful. The Chinese capital also says it is open to tinkering with the games’ arrangements based on IOC recommendations. AP