Beijing has achieved the expected results through the presentation that BOBICO officials made to the IOC in Lausanne, Switzerland, BOBICO officials said Friday.
Upon arrival in Beijing from Lausanne, BOBICO Co-Secretary General Wang Wei told reporters at the airport that Beijing had made its presentation as scheduled. He said that generally speaking, the presentation was successful.
Wang said that in order to make a good impression on the IOC, all the five candidate cities had been prepared for the presentation and staged an intensive competition. It was just like a race where every candidate is speeding ahead with full strength to achieve good result, according to Wang.
In the first bid campaign since the IOC adopted a package of reforms, each of the five candidate cities made a 10-minute presentation behind closed doors to an IOC Executive Board meeting last Wednesday.
Wang said that in order to learn the most possible information about the other candidate cities, the representatives of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games Bid Committee (BOBICO) attended the press conferences that the other candidates held in Lausanne. He said that in comparison, the press conference that Beijing held in Lausanne was a success.
IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch said that he was impressed with the presentations of the five candidate cities. He said that the presentations provided an opportunity for deepening mutual understanding between the IOC Executive Board and the candidate cities. The IOC took the opportunity to remind each of the 2008 candidates of the new rules: visits to bid cities and gifts to IOC members are prohibited.
"To remind them is not bad," Samaranch said. "It's a new era in relations between bid cities and IOC members. That is very important--no visits, no gifts. It represents the new philosophy of the IOC."
BOBICO Executive Vice President Liu Jingmin said that making presentation to the IOC Executive Board is only one step of the bid process. At present, Beijing is sparing no time to draft the Master Plan of staging the 2008 games in both English and French versions. And the city is also preparing the ground for an inspection tour that the IOC Evaluation Commission will make to Beijing next February.
The Evaluation Commission is a special institute that the IOC set up to assess the candidates' readiness to host the Olympics.
(People's Daily 12/19/2000)
