The fun will come, says games official

Enlarge Photo Paramilitary police stand in formation outside the National Stadium, also known as the Bird's Nest,...

Wed, Jul 23 01:07 PM

By Nick Mulvenney

BEIJING (Reuters) - The atmosphere in Beijing is already building and those predicting next month's Olympics will be the "no fun" Games were unaware of the level of security that always attends the event, an IOC official said on Wednesday.

A rash of bar closures, visa restrictions and security checks on vehicles and public transport have caused some media to predict that Beijing will lack the usual party atmosphere expected in an Olympic city.

"I think the people have just arrived and maybe they've never been at the Olympic Games because it's always like this before the Games when they put in place the security," Gilbert Felli, the International Olympic Committee (IOC)'s Olympic Games Executive Director told reporters.

"But I would say it's running very smoothly. If you go along to the Olympic Green in the evening you can hardly move because so many people are stopping to take pictures, so I can see some atmosphere and that's 10 days before the Games.

"For this country you can see that it really means something," he added. "It always means something but here it's even more than other places."

The Swiss, who was also a member of the IOC inspection team that has visited Beijing regularly since China was awarded the Games, said he was also surprised by the improvement in air quality.

IOC chief Jacques Rogge has said some endurance events at the Games would have to be rescheduled to prevent potential harm to the health of athletes if the air quality was too poor.

On Sunday, Beijing put into place a raft of measures, including traffic restrictions and factory closures aimed at reducing the city's air pollution for two months around the Olympics and September's Paralympics.

"I'm very surprised because I thought it would be different but it's much better, much better," said Felli. "You don't feel bad when you breathe so it looks good, I'm confident."

Felli said the problems broadcasters had experienced with getting permission to transmit from around Beijing and from iconic sites like Tiananmen Square had been resolved in principle and only the practical details needed sorting out.

"It's going forward in a very good direction," he said. "It's an application of a decision, it's not always so easy here in China. It's a big country and you have to change the mentality of people.

"That's not going to happen from one day to the next. We have to be patient and I'm sure that things will happen in the correct way."

Overall, Felli said he was delighted with how preparations were going a little more than two weeks before the opening ceremony and felt less anxious than he had before previous Games.

"We are very happy to see the level of operation, the quality of venues, the look of the city, flowers, trees, it's fantastic," he said.

"At a lot of the past Games, a lot of the technical aspects of the Games were not solved, but here they are solved," he added.

Inside News

Editor's picks