Equestrian Event Trots to China’s Political Agenda

When officers from the International Equestrian Federation arrived in China’s capital to discuss preparations for the horse-riding events at the 2008 Summer Olympics, they were in for an unpleasant surprise.

The federation and Beijing Olympic organizers had bargained for three years over the stringent health regimes needed to protect the show horses from disease.

But during the federation’s trip a year ago to discuss plans and tour the proposed venue, a decrepit suburban racetrack, the Chinese announced a change in plans. Beijing could not meet the requirements, they said, and the events should be moved to Hong Kong.

“Their presentations were full of ‘verything is impossible’ ” for Beijing, said Catrin Norinder, a member of the visiting delegation. “I’m not sure they tried very hard.”

Though publicly billed as a health issue, the episode had much to do with the communist government’s political ambitions for the Olympics.

Worried that Chinese rule over Hong Kong was being strained by democracy protests and the enclave’s faltering economy, leaders in Beijing decided an Olympic event in Hong Kong might be an image-booster, according to horse-industry executives, consultants and others involved in or briefed about the discussions.

The leadership “considered this a political issue,” Cheng Yu, an official with Beijing Turf and Equestrian Assn., a local horse-sports organization, said in an Internet posting to association members.

The change of venue, approved in July by the International Olympic Committee, marked one of the biggest glitches in Beijing’s generally smooth preparations for the 2008 Games. The OK came after months of heated politicking between Beijing, the IOC and the federation, the world’s governing body for horse sports.

The federation and even some in Hong Kong objected to the transfer. The coastal city is hot, humid and prone to typhoons in the summer, making competition a health risk for horses. And being so far from Beijing threatens to marginalize equestrian sports at a time when the IOC is trying to reduce the number of sports and costs in staging an Olympics.

Federation officials still feel they were pressured into acquiescing. “We don’t want to be seen as a headache, but we have to move horses around,” said Frits Sluyter, head of the veterinary department at the federation.

Officials from the Beijing Olympic organizing committee and Chinese agencies formerly in charge of the equestrian venue declined to be interviewed or answer questions submitted in writing by Associated Press.

The venue switch sheds light on the intense bargaining that accompanies every Olympics, but it also underlines how the 2008 Games are freighted with China’s political agenda.

For China, hosting the Olympics has been seen as a moment of national glory. The International Olympic Committee has walked a fine line, eager to bring the Games to a developing nation and booming sports market while worrying that the government may overly exploit the Olympics for nationalist aims.

The IOC rejected a Chinese proposal to hold the beach volleyball competition in Tiananmen Square, where the military quelled democracy demonstrations in 1989. It has yet to act on Beijing’s request that the Olympic torch be carried through Taiwan, the democratic island that has resisted Chinese demands for reunification.

When it came to the equestrian events, however, the IOC relented. An IOC spokesman, Mark Dolley, said equine-health issues led the organizing committee and equestrian federation to propose the change, which the IOC approved as “the best way to ensure excellent conditions for the athlete, horses and competition in general.”

Back in 2000 when Beijing bid for the 2008 Games, organizers promised to meet the federation’s exacting health requirements, including special quarantine measures and a six-mile disease-free zone around the competition venue. They selected a rundown racetrack on the city’s outskirts in the Shunyi district.

Right out of the gate, difficulties arose. Bids were solicited and then canceled. Beijing balked at the expense of the initial proposal, a $150-million facility with seating for 40,000 spectators, equestrian industry executives said.

On the health front, in early 2003 the equestrian federation gave Beijing a four-year schedule for meeting all the health requirements, the group’s Sluyter said. Over the next two years, the federation saw no real progress.

“We gave them several plans,” said Norinder, head of the group’s Olympics and events department. “Every time they said ... it was too complicated.”

As planning stumbled, Chinese leaders faced a more urgent crisis. Hong Kong -- the capitalist enclave China took over from Britain in 1997 -- was in trouble. Its once enviable economy was sagging, battered by the SARS outbreak, and popular approval for the Beijing-appointed governor, Tung Chee-hwa, was sinking. Three huge democracy protests were staged in Hong Kong.

Casting about for ways to shore up Tung’s popularity and its own image, the Beijing leadership saw the Olympics as a boon.

“Leaders in finance, government and sports tried to revive the flagging public morale,” Bernard Fong, an aide to Timothy Fok, head of Hong Kong’s Olympic committee, said in an e-mail.

Tung and Fok, the son of a wealthy Beijing loyalist, had lobbied for an Olympic event in Hong Kong from the moment Beijing won the bid. At meetings with Chinese leaders and Beijing officials, “every time, I took the opportunity to bring this up,” said Fok.

By mid-2004, the lobbying was in high gear, and Fok, who is also an IOC member, said the equestrian event seemed ripe for poaching, given the quarantine issues.

In the following months, Beijing Olympic officials dug in their heels on the quarantine and other health issues.

In private discussions with the International Olympic Committee and equestrian federation, Chinese officials offered a range of explanations for why they could not set up a disease-free zone in Beijing.

Federation officials were told a meat-processing plant near the venue would have to be closed for a month to keep pigs, and their diseases, from passing through the area, Norinder said.

The IOC, meanwhile, was told that large numbers of people would need to be relocated. “It could have become a big social issue,” said Gilbert Felli, the IOC’s executive director for Olympic Games.

Chinese and foreign veterinary experts, however, say the disease issues are resolvable and large numbers of people need not have been moved.

Beijing exploited the disease issue to provide cover for the political motives, said horse-industry executives and Lin Degui, a veterinary medicine expert at Beijing’s Agricultural University who was consulted on the health plans.

Tensions came to a head in early 2005. Federation leaders traveled to Beijing hoping to persuade Olympic organizers to reconsider. Instead, the organizers gave them a lengthy presentation on the need to switch to Hong Kong.

Afterward, the delegation, led by federation president Dona Pilar de Borbon, a Spanish princess, was invited to visit the meat-processing plant in Beijing.

She declined. “The president said she didn’t come all this way to see a slaughterhouse,” Norinder said.