Kuala Lumpur (dpa) – Kazakh officials expressed optimism Wednesday for their bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics in the city of Almaty, because of its natural beauty and abundance of snow.
China’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that the bid is intended to promote the Olympics in the country and would inspire more than 300 million Chinese to participate in winter sports.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) – When it comes to votes on Olympic host cities, geopolitics can play a crucial role in determining the victor.
Jiang, who is busy designing the official website of the 10th Chinese Traditional Games of Ethnic Minorities, which will open on August 9 in Erdos, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, is concerned if Beijing could win the bid.
While Almaty’s bid team has admitted the country “is very young and needs to improve tourism development”, it said 70% of the necessary venues were already in place and they were within 30km of each other.
“This bid is about more than sport for us…it’s about our future”, Kryukov said.
“At a time when the Chinese people are looking forward to a successful and exciting Winter Olympics, a few people with ulterior motives are politicizing the Olympic Games”, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said in a statement to Reuters. Its lobbyists are also pointing out that use of artificial snow for Winter Games is now a routine affair, and it is safe for athletics in some cases.
It’s one of the most geographically spread-out proposals for a winter Games, making transport links crucial.
“To quote Lao Tzu, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”, Ten said. They put in a [Winter Olympics] bid because they were asked to do it. We need to think like the Chinese [in the US]. The worldwide Olympic Committee will vote to decide the victor on July 31.
Du Yanlin, a Beijing activist who was recently detained for taking a selfie in Tiananmen Square to commemorate the 1989 military crackdown, said: “If the IOC wants to champion the purity of sport, it should not allow Beijing to host the Olympics”.
The IOC’s evaluation commission said after a visit to Beijing this year that the bid committee had given “written guarantees” about human rights and the right to demonstrate, without giving details.
“I’m talking to IOC members, I strongly believe we have a good chance to make it happen”, Massimov said.
Shijie is training hard for 2016 Rio Olympics now, while her mother, Suonan Jie, still enjoys the memory of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.
Speaking on a number of different issues associated with the bid, he described the country’s high levels of snow and clear winter sporting heritage as “our advantage”, while claiming the country will comply with IOC commitments regarding human rights and freedom of speech. Despite the narrow gap enjoyed by Almaty, Beijing still has the reputation and political influence that makes it the favorite to win the majority of votes. Almaty, former capital of Kazakhstan largely seen as an underdog, isn’t going down without a fight, as it hopes to hold its first-ever Olympics.
The IOC President Thomas Bach has elected not to vote along while a handful of other members, including Federation Internationale de Football Association president Sepp Blatter, were not present. The appeal of taking the biggest events to Asia, home to more than half of the world’s population and boasting the fastest growing regional economy in the world, is obvious and irresistible.
