The chief of an International Olympic Committee (IOC) evaluation commission said in Beijing on Saturday February 24 that they will only take into account the technical matters instead of politics in their inspection tour of the candidate cities for the 2008 Olympic Games.

"The evaluation commission's goal is to study the quality of bids on a technical basis not political issues," Hein Verbruggen, chairman of the evaluation commission, told reporters at a press conference at the end of their four-day inspection of Beijing, one of the bidding cities for 2008 Games.

"I think the IOC executive board was pretty explicit in its instructions to us," he said.

Before the evaluation tour started, IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch had explained the inspectors' mission in a letter to Verbruggen.

Samaranch wrote in the letter that the IOC Executive Board considers the role of the Evaluation Commission is to assess the ability of each candidate city under the best possible conditions for all participants -- primarily the athletes.

"IOC is an institution that I think must maintain the unity within the Olympic Movement, therefore we cannot take positions on political matters," said Verbruggen.

"In the end, the IOC is an organization of 122 individual members. Each will make their own decision based on their feelings of the matters," he said.

Beijing, along with Paris, Toronto, Istanbul and Osaka, is bidding for the 2008 Games and the IOC will make their final decision in July at Moscow.

(People's Daily 02/25/01)