News Archive
Beijing on track to success
Released on 30/04/2008
There are only 100 days to go and Beijing Olympic organizers and the IOC are confident that with construction of venues such as the National Stadium (pictured) finished or winding down fast, everything’s going to be fine on the night.
Even widespread anti-social habits like spitting, queue-jumping and littering are on the decline, according to one university study.
And easing the city's traffic congestion and cleaning up the air are all on target for the August 8-24 event.
“There is every reason to believe that we will see here a gold-medal performance in August, also superb organization of the Olympic Games,” Hein Verbruggen, chairman of the IOC's coordination commission for the Beijing Games, told reporters this month after his last inspection visit to the Chinese capital.
IOC president Jacques Rogge also predicted the Beijing Games to be a "great success".
"Here and there are small details to be fine-tuned but I am saying that the level of preparedness... is really excellent and... I am optimistic that the Games will be a great success,” he said.
The National Stadium, known as the Bird's Nest for its giant latticework structure of steel girders, opened and hosted its first official event on April 18 – a race-walking meet – putting an end to the massive construction campaign that kicked off in December 2003.
The nearby National Aquatics Center, known as the Water Cube, was completed in January and hosted its first test event in February, the China Open swimming competition.
Organisers also claim athletes competing outdoors won’t have to worry about being choked with smog. According to the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau, the city notched up 67 “blue sky days” from January to the end of March, 12 more than the same period a year earlier and the highest in nine years.
Since being awarded the 2008 Games seven years ago, the city has spent something like US$15 billion on anti-pollution measures such as moving factories, adding subway lines, upgrading boilers and converting coal-heated homes to electric.
The authorities plan to close factories and force 19 heavy polluters to reduce emissions by 30 percent for the two months around the Olympics and Paralympics, and measures to limit factory emission are also in place for areas surrounding the capital, including the city of Tianjin, the provinces of Hebei, Shanxi and Shandong, and the Inner Mongolia region.
Based on a study released last month by IOC's medical commission, Rogge said that the health of the athletes is "absolutely not in any danger" during Games.
Officials are also confident about bringing traffic congestion under control with a ban on some cars during the Olympics and a plan to set up special lanes on key roads that link competition sites with the athletes' village, the media village and training venues.
"Private vehicles, excluding taxis, will be ordered to stay off roads every other day in accordance with the even and odd numbers on the licence plates," Beijing's vice mayor Ji Lin said last month.
Meanwhile, various campaigns to improve the behavior of local citizens – namely, spitting, queue-jumping and littering – appear finally to have borne fruit. A survey released by Renmin University of China in February found that in 2007, 2.54 percent of people still spat, roughly a half of the figure for 2006, and the occurrence of littering in public dropped from 5.3 percent in 2006 to 2.86 percent in 2007 and queue-jumping from 6 percent to 1.5 percent.
