For First Time, China Lands the Olympics

The International Olympic Committee on Friday awarded the 2008 Summer Games to Beijing, a decision that for the first time brings the Games to the world’s most-populous nation.

In a secret ballot that critics said ignored concerns about China’s record on human rights, the IOC chose Beijing over Toronto; Paris; Istanbul, Turkey; and Osaka, Japan. Beijing prevailed in only the second round of voting by a bare majority but a wide margin--56 votes to 22 for Toronto, 18 for Paris and nine for Istanbul. Osaka had been eliminated after getting just six votes in the first round.

Televised live in China, where the bid was seen as nothing less than a referendum on the nation’s place in the world, the announcement set off a late-night celebration of flag-waving and fireworks.

In Moscow, the vote prompted many in Beijing’s bid team to jump up and down, swap high-fives and dance while waving stuffed panda bears high in the air. Some senior Chinese officials cried with joy.

“This will be very beneficial for China and for the rest of the world,” outgoing IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch. “Possibly, today opens up a new era for China.”

Elsewhere, it was hailed as a watershed moment for the nation that is home to more than one-fifth of the world’s people.

“This is a very important step in the evolution of China’s relationship with the world,” said former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, who helped open relations between Beijing and Washington in the 1970s. “It will have a positive impact.”

Opponents of Beijing’s bid, however, denounced the decision. They had called on the IOC to look elsewhere, citing a host of concerns that included China’s commitment to the death penalty and its treatment of, among others, Chinese-born U.S. citizens and legal U.S. immigrants.

“It truly boggles the mind,” Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo) said in Washington. He had introduced a resolution in Congress urging the IOC not to reward the authoritarian Communist regime; Republican leaders blocked it.

The IOC’s meetings in Moscow took place amid scattered protests by anti-Beijing activists. Hours before Friday’s vote, police broke up one such protest, and six people were seen being taken away. An activist who opposed Beijing’s bid said 12 people were detained.

Inside, all went smoothly for Beijing, starting with a presentation that featured an emotionally compelling video depicting the merits of Beijing’s bid, a film rich with symbols of ancient China and its rapid progression to modernity.

In interviews during the last several weeks, many IOC members had expressed a strong desire to go to China, home to 1.3 billion people, as a way of fostering political change and furthering the IOC’s mission of “universality.” The Summer Games, the IOC’s showcase, have been held in Asia only twice, in Tokyo in 1964 and Seoul in 1988.

Sponsor Firms Eye Golden Opportunities

Beijing also represents a significant opportunity for the IOC’s key sponsors, presenting vast new marketing opportunities for corporations such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Kodak and General Electric, parent of U.S. broadcaster NBC.

“To GE, this is an amazingly positive event,” NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol said, “to go into the world’s largest and newest market.”

In 1995, NBC paid $3.5 billion for the U.S. rights to the Games from 2000 through 2008, Summer and Winter. Besides last September’s Sydney Games, that package has bought the network the Salt Lake City Winter Games next February, and three Games outside the United States--Athens (Summer 2004); Turin, Italy (Winter 2006); and Beijing.

All pose time-zone difficulties that increase the pressure on NBC, which seeks to showcase the Olympics in prime time, to air part or all of each Games on tape delay.

But more serious logistical challenges lie ahead.

The traffic in Beijing is terrible, the smog awful, the summer weather sometimes oppressively hot and humid. And then there is the language barrier.

The Chinese, though, project the spending of $14.3 billion by 2008, for sports facilities as well as highway construction and a massive subway extension to properly welcome the world to the Games. By comparison, the Paris 2008 bid projected $2 billion in capital improvements.

“It needed more courage to say yes than no [to Beijing],” Swiss IOC member Rene Fasel said. “It’s a great opportunity for us to take the Olympic values of peace and friendship to a very big country, and a very big city. It’s a big challenge for us.”

The election Friday marked the IOC’s first for the Summer Games since the Salt Lake City corruption scandal broke in late 1998. The vote underscored a growing sentiment that the IOC has weathered the worst of it.

That “crisis,” as Samaranch calls it, led to a 50-point reform plan and a major change in the way such elections are conducted.

In December 1999, as part of the reforms, the IOC barred its members from bid-related visits to cities vying for the Games. Instead, an “evaluation commission” was charged with touring the cities and producing a report, which would be used for judging a particular city’s merits.

Even before the commission’s report, issued in May at IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, Beijing had emerged as the 2008 favorite.

For one thing, Beijing had lost to Sydney in 1993 for the right to stage the 2000 Games, and the IOC has a recent history of making up for such losses. As just one of many such examples, in 1990 Athens lost the 1996 Games to Atlanta, then in 1997, Athens defeated Rome for the 2004 Games.

But more significantly, the IOC’s evaluation report proclaimed that the Games would leave “a unique legacy to China and to sport.”

Paris, Toronto Each Had Problems

The report did not praise the Paris or Toronto bids that way, although it did say both were attractive. It all but doomed Osaka and Istanbul with negative assessments.

The Paris bid had proposed the running of the marathon down the Champs Elysees and the playing of beach volleyball at the base of the Eiffel Tower. “Sexy,” Jean-Claude Killy, the French skiing legend and IOC member, had said.

Heading into Friday’s vote, however, Paris faced two problems:

Some IOC members had privately expressed unease at coordinating IOC authority over doping issues at the Games with the aggressive stance France has taken since a doping scandal stained the 1998 Tour de France bicycle race.

In addition, with the 2004 Summer Games in Athens and the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, going to France in 2008 would be problematic--particularly because London, Madrid, Moscow and other European cities want the 2012 Summer Games.

Paris not only finished third in the second round of voting, it was fourth in the first round, with 15 votes, behind even Istanbul. Beijing got 44 votes in Round 1.

“What happened?” Killy said afterward, asking a rhetorical question before saying: “Big loss, big loss.”

Toronto had put forth a bid that claimed to put the athletes’ interests first. The innovative plan called for a four-mile development along the Lake Ontario waterfront featuring 17 venues for 25 sports, as well as the Olympic village.

Its chances were essentially ruined, however, by Mayor Mel Lastman, who said before a recent trip to Africa to promote the bid that he saw himself “in a pot of boiling water with all these natives dancing around me.”

Despite the loss, Toronto’s second-place showing immediately positions it as a strong candidate for the 2012 Games.

The results also keep alive hopes in the United States for the 2012 Olympics. Los Angeles, New York, Washington and five other cities want the 2012 Games.

This, though, is Beijing’s time--and an intriguing test of whether the Games will help accelerate reform, as Chinese leaders have said.

“On the human rights question we have [already] achieved a tremendous progress,” said Yuan Weimin, China’s minister of sports. “In the next stage of our national development, we will continue to open ourselves wider to the outside world and carry out more reforms.”

*

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Olympics VoteVote totals from Friday’s balloting to pick the host city for the 2008 Summer Games:First Round

(52 votes needed to win)

Beijing: 44

Toronto: 20

Istanbul: 17

Paris: 15

Osaka: 6

Second Round

(53 votes needed to win)

Beijing: 56

Toronto: 22

Paris: 18

Istanbul: 9

Osaka: *

NOTE: IOC members from candidate countries are ineligible to vote.

*Osaka eliminated by first round vote

Source: Associated Press