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Roundup: IOC President Has Full Confidence in Beijing
Jacques Rogge, the newly- elected president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), has full confidence that Beijing will deliver a "best possible" Olympic Games in 2008.
Rogge said at a press conference Monday afternoon that the IOC is "totally confident" that Beijing Games is in the position of putting on an excellent Games.
"Of course I have not seen much of the installations, because I have just arrived here this morning," said Rogge. "But I am sure that the organizers of the 2008 Games will provide what is needed. "
He added that Beijing has won the Games by an overwhelming majority of votes and the IOC made the decision on the basis of " an excellent evaluation report".
Starting from February, the IOC evaluation commission began their inspection of the five candidate cities of the 2008 Olympiad before working out the evaluation reports in May.
Under the new bidding rule which forbids IOC members to visit the candidate cities, the evaluation report has weighed more in the selection of the host.
Rogge referred to evaluation commission vice chief Gilbert Felli, who also attended the press conference, saying that the IOC sports director has inspected Beijing in detail.
"I think the evaluation report speaks for itself," said Rogge.
At the press conference, George Killian, president of the International University Sports Federation (FISU), lavished praises on what Beijing has done for the Universiade.
He said since the opening ceremony, "everything has been what we have expected."
"I do not know what more we can do to make it a superb Universide," said Killian. "We have no negative thoughts whatever of the Universiade."
The IOC president reconfirmed its position that the IOC as a sporting body doesn't want to get involved in politics.
Rogge said they will send a coordination commission to help Beijing's preparation for the 2008 Olympics and the body will only deal with sporting issues.
"The task of the coordination commission is to take care of the sport aspect and prepare the Olympic Games as good as possible," he said, when replying to a question of whether the IOC will use the coordination commission to monitor the human rights conditions of China.
"The IOC is of course in favor of the best possible situation of human rights in all countries in the world," said Rogge. "But the IOC is not a political body, the IOC is a sports body."
"It is not the task of the IOC to get involved in monitoring or lobbying or influencing," said the president. "Of course we are totally in favor of the human rights. The better they are, the better we would be pleased."
Beijing will build on experiences of the previous Games through a program of "Knowledge Transfer", said the president.
"The reason for that (program) is that each Olympic organizer must start from zero and has no chance to rehearse and has no experience because this is something you organize once in a lifetime," said Rogge.
"We have a program with all the information needed."
But Rogge stressed that such information must be adapted to the local "economic, political, cultural and social environment".
Rogge declined to go further on how the IOC will help Beijing.
"It is here too soon for me to tell you exactly what help would be given to our friends in Beijing," Rogge said. "It will be studied by the coordination commission but there will be a lot of transfer of information and knowledge."
Rogge also told reporters that the Olympiad needs to be scaled down to keep the Olympic Movement on the right track.
"We would hope the Games in Beijing will be organized in an ideal size," said Rogge.
"The Games in Sydney were the best ever, but we realized that the size of the Games is getting a little too big and is getting to the limit for the city can deliver."
He said that the IOC therefore would study the way to reduce the cost and scale of the Games so that the money could be saved and the Games will become less complicated to stage.
"We are going to study that and we are going to ask the Chinese friends to take that into consideration in their organization," he said.
But the president stressed that the reform to the Olympic Games will be carried out without "touching the sporting size."
"We will not diminish the number of sports, we will not diminish the number of athletes," said Rogge.
He also expressed hope that the 2008 Olympiad will mark the significant progress in the fight against doping which has been dogging the Olympic Movement for long.
"That is the second biggest concern of the IOC, we are going to work on these two issues as priority," he added.
On the IOC's choice of Olympic city, Rogge said the preference should go to the continent that has not staged the Games.
But the preference is under the precondition that the candidates have the same quality, Rogge said, in response to a question if the IOC would copy the way of world soccer ruling body FIFA, which has decided to rotate the World Cup between continents after 2006.
"The IOC would wish that the Games could be organized in continents that have not organized the Games like Africa or some other continents like Latin America," said Rogge. "They deserve to get the Games."
But he added the Games has become too costly and too complicated for countries in these continents to organize the Games.
"That is the reason why IOC want to review the costs and sophistication of the Games so that all the continents could organize the Games," he said.
But as to whether the IOC will make the rotation between continents an obligation the president said that their position is "the quality goes first".
"That means that in order to get the Games, the city of that continent must prove that they have the absolute quality to do that," he added.
He also pointed out that to make the rotation obligatory would likely hurt the interests of the athletes.
"The athletes would suffer. We go to the athletes first," he said.
Rogge took the helm of the Olympic Movement on July 16, when Juan Antonio Samaranch retired after 21 years on the top.
The new president told reporters that Samaranch, now IOC honorary president for life, has been resting at home in Barcelona and is living a healthy and happy life.
"He was in hospital for about a month but has been discharged this weekend," said Rogge.
"He is resting at home, in good health, in good mood," he added.
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