The worldwide Olympic Committee voted to make Beijing the first city to host both the winter and summer games.
Advertisement
Beijing was chosen over Almaty of Kazakhstan, the only other candidate for the host job, after the voting session during the 128th IOC Session ended 44-40 in favour of Beijing while one abstained.
“We will leverage this success to popularize and develop winter sport in China“, Wang told reporters. The Los Angeles Times has more on concerns from rights group, which argue that China’s human rights record has grown worse, not better, since the country hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Massimov said the IOC has been “brave” in the past, including by challenging apartheid in South Africa, going to Moscow for the 1980 Games at the height of the Cold War and giving the games to Beijing in 2008.
The Winter Games will be split between three sites: the city of Zhangjiakou, 125 miles from Beijing in the Hebei province; in Yanqing, a mountainous region to Beijing’s north-west; and in Beijing itself. The decision, however, earned the ire of some human rights activists.
China’s humanitarian issues can be traced back to the forced evictions during the 2008 Olympics, and recently to its “abusive, unaccountable domestic security forces”, reported CNN. “The honour of a second Olympic Games is a propaganda gift to China”, it said. “Furthermore, it can also promote winter sports for people with intellectual disabilities”, said Chen Yuping, the leader for the Chinese Pingpong team for the special Olympics. The Swiss city, the home of the IOC, picked up 71 votes with Brasov gaining 10.
Beijing, together with Zhangjiakou, won the bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, and the news exhilarated the Chinese athletes, coaches and Chinese Americans at the Special Olympics in Los Angeles. “They were low-profile during the bidding process because they weren’t quite sure of what the result would be”, Zhu wrote on his Weibo microblog.
Some of Beijing’s 2008 venues, including its iconic Bird’s Nest national stadium will be reused for the 2022 Games.
In the United States, we just saw Boston abandon its bid to host the 2024 Olympics because the majority of the city’s residents had no interest in hosting it. People blamed the USOC for picking a bad city and not understanding the mood in Boston, but how many options did they really have? Some were scared off the by the $51 billion price tag associated with the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia.
Advertisement
The high-powered Chinese delegation assured IOC members that Beijing was the safe choice because it had already proved it could stage the Games and said it would take winter sports into the backyard of the world’s most populated country. This is especially the case when it comes to the Winter Games, as a majority of the members have little connection with winter sports. The only other bid, from the city of Almaty in Kazakhstan, had flaws that included a lack of hotel rooms and scant experience with worldwide events.
