Chief London organizer Sebastian Coe thinks China is likely to change
fundamentally in the decade after the 2008 Beijing Games.
Coe said the examples of Tokyo 1964, Mexico 1968, Munich 1972, Moscow 1980
and Seoul in 1988 proved that the International Olympic Committee were right to
ignore critics of China's human rights record and award the Games to the Chinese
capital.
London Mayor Ken
Livingstone (L) and London 2012 Games chairman Sebastian Coe stand in
front of the Beijing Olympic countdown clock near Tiananmen Square in
Beijing April 9, 2006. [Reuters] |
"You don't award a Games to a country in isolation of its history and social
fabric," Coe, chairman of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games
(LOCOG), told Reuters in an interview on Monday.
"Every country has a unique history, but the one thing that is uniform to all
those cities is that the Games have fundamentally changed the way they are
perceived externally and often the way they continue their day-to-day business
internally.
"The Olympic Games is often a great catalyst for change, not that obvious at
the time, but quite clear correlations within the next decade."
Of more immediate concern to Coe is the progress of London's preparations to
host the 2012 Games, the main reason for the two-time Olympic 1500m champion's
visit to Beijing.
"I think there are lots of things we can learn from Beijing," he said.
"You don't often get the chance to see a working model and certainly it is
essential to tap into the insights of an organising committee."
Coe said he was most interested in how Beijing turned their bid into reality
and in getting co-operation to help deliver on one of the key commitments of the
London bid -- getting more young people involved in sport.
SINGAPORE EUPHORIA
Visiting Beijing, Coe said, would help LOCOG to put the euphoria of winning
the right to host the Games in Singapore last year behind them.
"It's very important for us to see the size and scale of it, but it's also
part of the process of switching the brain 180 degrees," he said.
"Singapore is a nice warm, glow of a memory but it's now about six years of
delivery," he added. "Switching from bidding to doing is a big thing and some
cities won't get there quickly enough."
Beijing wasted no time in getting out of the blocks after their successful
bid in 2001 and were running ahead of schedule in venue construction last year.
Coe said LOCOG would look on their visit to Beijing as a benchmark to see
where London should be in 2010.
"Whether we'll be at the same place in the construction of facilities we
don't know, because our time lines are still being worked out," he said.
"But what I've noticed is that there is definitely an Olympic feel to the
city in the advertising and everything. I know that I'm in a city that's on a
two-year countdown."