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MOSCOW, July 13
(Xinhuanet) -- The International OlympicCommittee (IOC)
awarded the2008
OlympicGames to Beijing in Friday's vote
during Juan Antonio Samaranch's last IOC session
as president.
The attraction of staging
the Games in a country which has the world's
largest population, as well as huge economic potential,
won the IOC's heart.
Out of 122
IOC members, 105 voted in Friday's secret ballot
that ended after second round when Beijing
collected a winning majority of 56 votes.
Toronto finished a distant second with 22 votes,
followed by Paris on 18 and Istanbul on 9.
Osaka was eliminated on 6 votes in the first
round, in which Beijing garnered 44 votes, Toronto
22, Istanbul 17 and Paris 15.
Thirteen IOC
members from the countries of candidate cities
were not allowed to vote. Samaranch couldn't vote
either.
Judge Keba Mbaye from Senegal, the
chief tally of the 1993 ballot in which Beijing
lost to Sydney by two votes, scrutinized Friday's
vote along with IOC vice president Thomas Bach of Germany
and Francisco Elizalde of the Philippines.
After sitting out the contest for the 2004 Games, which were
awarded to Athens, Greece, Beijing came back this
time with a new and improved bid.
With the motto "New Beijing, Great
Olympics", Beijing promises to host a
"Green Olympics, a "Hi-tech Olympics" and a
"People's Olympics".
The 3,000-year-old city is ready to become a
truly international city and showing a new,
vigorous image through its ongoing economic
reforms.
To many Olympic observers,
Beijing's case for the Games is simple: China is
home to a fifth of the world's population but
never has hosted the Olympics. It is also an
international sports giant, finishing third in
medals at last year's Sydney Games. And it is a
largely untapped market for the products of corporate
sponsors.
Beijing enjoys the
most popular support among the five bidding
cities. An independent Gallup opinion
poll showed 94.9 percent of the public in favor of it. The
IOC's own surveys found support even higher.
By comparison, only about two-thirds of
the public in France backed the Paris bid;
Canadians expressed about the same amount of support for
Toronto's bid.
The Beijing bid has been
endorsed by world known athletes like Kenya's
five-time world cross-country champion, Paul Tergat,
Australia's most prominent Aboriginal sports
figure, Cathy Freeman, one of the table tennis all-time
greats, Jan-Ove Waldner from Sweden.
The Chinese government has pledged to spend 20
billion U.S. dollars building sports complexes and
refurbishing the Beijing infrastructure.
There are plans for a new exhibition center with
twin skyscrapers that could be taller than any in
the world.
About 3.7 billion U.S. dollars
will go to ease traffic, tripling the length of
the city's highways and quadrupling the capacity
of its subway system.
In addition, about
400 million U.S. dollars has been earmarked to
upgrade the health care system, and city officials want to
pour another 400 million U.S. dollars into communications
and technology infrastructure. Enditem
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