Temat: Busy in Beijing

By Gordon Farquhar
Five Live sports news correspondent in Beijing

As I travelled to my hotel after arriving in Beijing, I witnessed an incident that seemed to perfectly sum up the Chinese capital.

Three businessmen in sharp suits, travelling in a top-of-the-range Mercedes, were obliged to give way at a busy intersection to an elderly woman toiling away on a tricycle loaded with firewood.

It was a fitting symbol of how the old order is meeting the new in modern Beijing.

I was last here six years ago during the bidding process for the 2008 Games, and the city's officials were on edge.

They had already been turned down once by the IOC membership (in 1993) and were fretting that the same could happen again.

Now the officials are concerned that they might fail to live up to what is expected of them.


It will be fortunate if the Games gets away with 17 pollution-free days of competition

We can probably dismiss fears that venues will not be finished in time for August 2008 right away though.

Beijing is a city that knows a thing or two about delivering large-scale building projects. The skyline is packed with new tower blocks of offices and apartments.

These are modern, sweeping designs that impress with their scope and scale, so I would expect the structures, roads, accommodation, media and athlete villages and sports centres to make the mark.

What the organisers are grappling with is what it takes to deliver a Games that exceeds the sum of its parts.

In one example of how they're trying to find the X-factor, they have decided to produce booklets to educate local spectators who will fill the stadiums.

Some of the Olympic sports are still largely a mystery to the Chinese public, and officials don't want a repeat of what happened in Seoul, where crowds, unaware of the etiquette, sometimes cheered in the wrong places.

There will be television programmes to re-enforce the messages, along with general lessons in how to behave with "civility".

Beijing wants to be a thoughtful host, sensitive to the different cultures of its visitors. This is as much about foreign policy as sport.

Yet there are some issues that will be impossible to gloss over. A thousand cars are registered here every day, exacerbating one of Beijing's biggest problems, pollution.


It is difficult to find anyone who will give a straight answer to the simple question "how much will it all cost?"

In 1998, there were only 100 days a year when the air quality met internationally-recognised standards. With a £6bn investment programme, accelerated by the Games, that has now improved to 240 days a year.

It sounds great, until you do the maths and realise that's still one day in three when smog is a problem.

It will be fortunate if the Games gets away with 17 fug-free days of competition. Still, when the breeze blows, and the stadia emerge from the mire, they will look striking on our TV screens.

The 90,000-seat Olympic stadium is an architect's fantasy (and probably an engineer's nightmare). I have never seen anything like it before. It has 42,000 tonnes of interlocking steel arranged around and over the seating, leading to descriptions of it as the "bird's nest stadium".

Then there's the "water cube", a huge aquatic complex, bubble-wrapped in high-tech plastic skin, serving as a luminescent counter-point to the stadium.

It has been paid for entirely by donations from China's wealthy ex-pats in Hong Kong, Singapore and beyond.

Most of the venues have been funded by public-private partnership schemes, helping to minimise the impact on the city exchequer.

The "water cube" aquatics centre
The "water cube", where aquatic events will be held
But it is still difficult to find anyone who will give a straight answer to the simple question "how much will it all cost?"

The infrastructure will cost billions, but the organising committee insists that running costs will not exceed those of Athens in 2004, which were about £1.2 billion.

Beijing's economy grew 12% last year and average per-capita income has doubled since 2000, at a time when the city's population has also risen substantially to more than 15 million.

China has the world's largest foreign exchange reserves, (about half a trillion pounds,) so there's little doubt it can afford to fund the capital-building projects necessitated by the Games.

Beijing was an attractive proposition to the IOC in 2001, because of the opportunity it represented.

In its sales pitch, the city pledged to use the Games as an instrument of change to improve the lives of its people.

Beijing set the bar high and will have to demonstrate genuine progress in respecting human rights and introducing effective environmental protection policies before the international consensus is prepared to declare the Games a success.

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