Beijing was awarded the hosting rights to the 2022 Winter Olympics on Friday, setting up the Chinese capital to become the first city to stage both the Summer and Winter Games.
Members of the International Olympic Committee, which is holding its annual congress in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, this week, voted in favor of Beijing, which hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008, over its lone competitor, Almaty, Kazakhstan. The vote was 44 to 40, a margin that was far smaller than many observers had predicted given the familiarity of Chinese organizers with voters and the relative anonymity of Almaty in the sporting community.
While many nations, including the United States, have hosted both the Summer and Winter Games, no single city had been able to convince International Olympic Committee voters that it had the requisite infrastructure, financial resources and climate necessary to pull off such a double.
Beijing, it should be noted, did not necessarily do that either, but it won over the delegates with an elaborate plan that uses some well-known venues from the Summer Games, including the Bird’s Nest stadium and the Water Cube arena, in addition to relying on an elaborate, artificial snow-making operation to account for the fact that its surrounding region has few mountains and, generally, little actual snow.
0 comments:
Post a Comment