Beijing held its formal opening ceremony today for the 2008 Summer Olympics. The ceremony, held in the National Stadium known as the Bird’s Nest, was attended by thousands, and watched by millions more on television. Below are some highlights of the nearly 4-hour performance.
See the rest here: 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony
Tokyo’s hopes of hosting the 2016 Olympics were shattered Friday as the Japanese capital was eliminated in the second round of voting by the International Olympic Committee.
Rio de Janeiro was named the winner of rights to stage the 2016 Games, beating Madrid in the final round of voting to become the first South American Olympic host. Rio had 66 votes to Madrid’s 32.
Chicago was eliminated in the first round of voting before Tokyo’s exit left the race down to the Rio and Madrid. Tokyo had 22 votes in the first round and 20 in the second.
Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama released a statement Saturday congratulating the Brazilian people on Rio de Janeiro’s win in a bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.
‘‘I want to offer my heartfelt appreciation for the citizens of Tokyo and athletes,’’ said Tokyo Gov Shintaro Ishihara. ‘‘Let’s use this precious experience, while tackling environmental issues and contribute to the development of world cities. I pray for the success of the Games in Rio de Janeiro.’’
Under host city voting procedures, the city with the fewest number of votes in each successive round of balloting is eliminated until one city has reached a majority of the valid votes cast.
The International Olympic Committee is no stranger to tough decisions. It took the risk of sending the games to Beijing and said “No” to New York in the aftermath of 9/11. Yet, despite all of that accumulated experience, some IOC members are struggling with their latest conundrum: choosing the Olympic host for 2016.
Just two days ahead of the vote, many were undecided.
And that means two things—it’s still too close to call between Rio de Janeiro, Chicago, Tokyo and Madrid and, for the next couple of days, IOC members are going to feel that they are the most popular people on the planet. Everyone in Copenhagen, where they are gathered, seemingly wants to be their new best friend.
Want to meet Michelle Obama? Not a problem if you’re an IOC member who needs a little pointer on which way to vote. The first lady, beating her husband to the Danish capital, has a two-room suite in the IOC hotel, with homely white leather furniture and an interactive table that, at the touch of a hand, gives bird’s eye views of how a Chicago Olympics might look.
Mrs Obama arrived Wednesday, two days ahead of the U.S. leader, and got straight to work on impressing IOC members.
“We’re not taking anything for granted, so I’m going to go talk to some voters,” she said.
IOC members who have been through this selection process repeatedly, previously sending the games to London, Beijing, Athens and Sydney, told The Associated Press that they could not remember a tougher choice. The AP canvassed the opinions of a dozen IOC members. With all four cities seen as amply capable, technically at least, of holding the Olympics, they said much will ride on how well or badly the cities make their case in final 45-minute presentations to the IOC on Friday before the successive rounds of secret balloting.
“I have two favorites,” IOC member Nicole Hoevertsz said. “It’s going to come down to the last, last presentation. It’s going to come down to the last minute.”
As tension mounted, so did tempers. Despite fresh IOC warnings that the cities should avoid criticizing their rivals, the Spanish Olympic Committee’s vice president, Jose Maria Odriozola, told the national Efe news agency that “Rio is the worst bid.”
Rio bid organizers said the criticism was “totally unacceptable” and formally complained to the IOC.
The outcome Friday could hinge on which cities are eliminated first and, if and when their favorites are knocked out, how IOC members subsequently line up behind the other candidates. That makes predicting a winner perilous and means that even members who say they already have made their choice are still worth lobbying.
“It is difficult enough to know where the first-round votes are going to go, so trying to imagine where the swinging votes are going to go is impossible,” said Spanish IOC member Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr, whose father served as IOC president for 21 years.
“Events in the next 48 hours will decide the winner, because they will have a significant influence on the second- and third-round votes,” he said.
Samaranch said he believes nearly all the IOC’s 106 members already have a favorite. But IOC vice president Chiharu Igaya said “many” members are undecided.
Added British IOC member Craig Reedie: “This is really close. The closer it gets the more people will say, let me think about it. We all want to see the presentations. It’s what people see that will count. Decided? No, I haven’t actually. I’m getting close.”
Late, high-powered lobbying can be important—as then-Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie, proved when London campaigned successfully for the 2012 Olympics. Blair traveled to Singapore ahead of the vote and spent two days lobbying members, inviting them to his hotel suite for one-on-one meetings.
Chicago tore a leaf from Blair’s playbook: Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett met with him last week to solicit his advice and get tips on navigating the IOC voting process.
But for the first time, there are no IOC executive board meetings in the days leading up to the vote. That means less opportunity for schmoozing.
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Bahrain athlete Rashid Ramzi, who won gold in the 1500m and Italian cyclist Davide Rebellin, who won a silver, are among the six athletes who are found positive for doping in retesting of Beijing samples.
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Six Olympic athletes are found positive for doping in retesting of Beijing samples, says the International Olympic Committee.
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One the most sexy Olympic Beauty is Olympic champion Wu Minxia.
Wu represented China at the 2004 Summer Olympics, earning a gold medal in the 3 meter women’s synchronized springboard along with Guo Jingjing before winning a silver medal in the 3 meter women’s synchronized springboard, coming in second place behind Guo Jingjing.
China’s Olympic champions Wu Minxia (near the camera) and Guo Jingjing dive during the women’s three-meter springboard synchronized preliminary at the “Good Luck Beijing” FINA Diving World Cup. [Xinhua]
Softball will seek to rejoin the Olympics alone after its governing body on Friday rejected baseball‘s proposal to make a joint pitch for inclusion.
Softball and baseball were dropped from the Olympics after last year’s Beijing Games but are among seven sports targeting the 2016 event when two sports will be added to the lineup.
In lobbying efforts, the International Softball Federation (ISF) has attempted to distance itself from baseball, which has been criticised by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for Major League Baseball’s failure to tackle doping issues and for not freeing top players to participate in the Games.
Golf, squash, rugby, karate and rollersports are the others sports hoping to join the Olympics.
“The ISF recently received a proposal from the International Baseball Federation for a combined approach for Olympic Games programme status,” ISF president Don Porter said in a statement.
“However, having looked at all the factors involved, the ISF has decided that softball will not combine with any other sport and stands by the current proposals to the International Olympic Committee submitted in our recent response to their questionnaire.
“We have offered the IOC a doping-free, universal team sport that reflects Olympic values all over the world.
“Softball is also a stand-alone sport with its own rules, values, and philosophy.”
Since softball was voted out of the Olympics in 2005, the ISF has launched a vigorous campaign for reinstatement.
Softball has attempted to address the IOC’s two biggest concerns that the sport is not played at the highest level in enough countries and is dominated by the U.S..
The ISF has introduced several new competitions around the world and pointed to Japan’s upset win over the U.S. in the gold medal final in Beijing as a sign the sport is growing.
The IOC will vote on the inclusion of up to two new sports during its congress in Copenhagen in October.
source: reuters.com
North Side resident John Berchem says Chicago’s Olympic bid will be worth it.
“The benefits to the city seem fabulous,” Berchem says. “Sure, it’s going to cost the taxpayers a lot of money. But, so what?”
South Side housing activist Ora Williams says she’s concerned neighborhood residents will be displaced by Olympic-related development projects.
Their comments came during an event yesterday at the Union League Club previewing the city’s Olympic bid book, which the Chicago 2016 committee will present to the International Olympic Committee on Feb. 12.
John Murray, vice president and chief of bid operations for Chicago 2016, presented an outline of Chicago’s strengths, including landscape, culture and people, and a look at the proposed locations for sporting venues and the Olympic Village. He also gave an overview of the benefits the games will bring to Chicago.
“It’s not about trying to out-do a city like Beijing,” Murray said, noting the Chinese capital’s preparation for the games last summer. “It’s about pointing the way to Chicago and putting our own stamp on the Olympic festival for the millions of people in the city and billions of people around the world.”
Details of how the city will deal with transit, housing and public safety were scarce during his presentation.
Some of the nearly 100 people in the audience asked questions about the Olympics’ impact on the city, particularly how the games will be paid for and their impact on Chicago taxpayers.
The number of travelers to China dropped by 2 million in 2008 in what was supposed to be a banner year for tourism but became one dampened by Olympics-related security measures and the global economic crunch.
It was the first decline in visitor numbers since 2003, when a deadly outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS, kept many people away.
The number of inbound travelers fell to 130 million last year, China’s National Tourism Administration said on its Web site.
“All major inbound source markets, except for Hong Kong and Russia, slumped last year amid the economic downturn,” the administration’s director, Shao Qiwei, was quoted as saying by the official China Daily newspaper Thursday.
Neither statement mentioned other factors affecting travel to China, though industry experts also blamed tightened visa restrictions before the Beijing Olympics and a May earthquake in southwest China that left 90,000 dead or missing.
Authorities feared protests around the Olympics would mar the flawless image of China that the government wanted to promote and made visa procedures more strict in an effort to weed out potential troublemakers such as foreign activists. That also kept out many would-be visitors.
“The high cost of hotel and air tickets may also have had an effect, but taking into consideration the spending power of foreigners compared to Chinese, they wouldn’t just drop their plans because of higher prices,” said Li Lei, chief editor of Chinese travel industry Web site Tourismvane.com.
THE past year will be remembered as the year of the “Lightning” Bolt that struck at the Beijing Olympic Games. Usain Bolt certainly stunned the world with his world record-breaking performances in the 100 and 200 metre sprints. Next year‘s world championship meeting in August in Berlin will be the highlight of the world athletics calendar and will surely deliver another round of explosive performances from the sprinter.
The question is: How much faster can Bolt still go? Then the question is also asked whether defending world champion Tyson Gay will be able to bounce back or will Asafa Powell be the dark horse to content with?
Bolt has been hinting at competing in the 400m and a Bolt, Jeremy Wariner and LaShawn Merrit race might just blow some life into the sport again.
As athletes stroke the sporting gold at the Beijing Olympic Games, those big-name sporting brands hope that the effort or cash spent in preparation for the Games would also be proved lucrative. However, sometimes, things are unpredictable, just like “anything is possible”.
Being one of the of ficial sponsors, Adidas, involved with the Games since 1928, determined to secure a bigger slice of the Chinese market, where it is in strong competition with Nike.
“The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games will serve as a platform for the brand to become the leading sports brand in China,” said Erica Kerner, director of Adidas’s Beijing 2008 Olympic program me. Through a combination of TV, pr int , outdoor, public relations, digital, point-of-sale and roadshows across the country, the”Im possible is Nothing” Olympic marketing campaign aims to bring sport engagement with Chinese consumers to a new level”.
Especial ly on July 5, Adidas opened its largest Brand Center worldwide, with a size of 3,170m² occupying four floors, inside the new Sanlitun Village Shopping Center in Beijing, featuring a range of unique interact ive elements that will provide consumers with a truly special retail experience.
IT’s a strange world in which Michael Phelps can win a record eight Olympic gold medals and still be challenged for pre-eminence in the year of the Beijing Games.
But a bolt from the blue Caribbean, in the shape of Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, managed to drag the spotlight from the Water Cube to the Bird’s Nest, as two of history’s greatest athletes framed the Games of the XXIX Olympiad.
International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge declared the two men the “icons of the Games”.
In a record-breaking year for records, the pair were also the foremost exponents of the art of going where no athlete has gone before.
Appropriately for the first Olympics staged in China, Phelps and Bolt represented the Yin and Yang of great champions — the swimmer and the runner, water and earth, a diet of 12,000 calories a day versus chicken nuggets for breakfast. Phelps lit up the Games by day (thanks to NBC’s insistence on morning finals in the pool) and Bolt by night.
But where Phelps’ triumphant march was expected, even demanded (NBC was counting on it), Bolt’s sudden rise to superstardom was a joyous gift for his troubled sport, beset by doping scandals which had tarnished its credibility along with some once-great names.
It takes a huge talent to hold 90,000 people in thrall but Bolt captured them at the Bird’s Nest from the moment he dashed down the straight to win the 100m in a world record 9.69sec, becoming the fastest man on the planet, despite a side-stepping celebration over the last 20m that may have cost him up to 0.1sec.
But Bolt’s Calypso rhythm and youthful exuberance brought much-needed star quality to the main stadium.
The only time that 21-year-old Bolt was deadly serious was when he stepped onto the blocks for the 200m final. A 200m specialist as a junior competitor, he was desperate to break his hero Michael Johnson’s lauded world record of 19.32sec from Atlanta in 1996.
Bolt ran the half-lap with his eyes only on that mark and every fast-twitch fibre straining forward, stopping the clock in an astonishing 19.30sec.
And he wasn’t finished there. The showman of the Games then combined with former world 100m record-holder Asafa Powell and his Jamaican team-mates to set a third world record in the 4x100m relay.
His name was attached to three of the five world records to fall at the Bird’s Nest.
If Bolt was the king of the track, Russia’s Yelena Isinbayeva was the queen of the air, after she soared to a world record of 5.05m in the pole vault to clinch her second successive Olympic gold medal.
Relish the memories – 2008 was a special year for sport, and the outlook for the next few does not appear half so rosy.
Next year is thin in terms of big international events. The World Athletics Championships take place in Berlin, and it is left to rugby union – a minority sport globally – to provide another highlight when the British and Irish Lions tour South Africa, the world champions. And further ahead, the successor hosts of two of this year’s stellar events, the Olympic Games and the European Football Championships, have hard acts to follow, with fewer resources and the global economic crisis to combat.
The Beijing Olympics was the apex of 2008. China opened its doors to the world and demonstrated that it could organise a successful sporting extravaganza. It did so by hurling massive amounts of money and manpower at the Games, in a manner that perhaps only an authoritarian state could. The yin and yang nature of the event was symbolised by the happiness and pride of the Chinese people at hosting the world’s biggest sporting party on the one hand, and their government’s refusal to budge an inch over human rights on the other.
Usain Bolt let those long legs loose at the Bird’s Nest, and he left Beijing with three Olympic gold medals, three world records and hundreds of millions of new fans around the world.
Virtually unknown at the start of the year, the Jamaican sprinter was the star of the track in 2008, first setting a world record in the 100 meters at the end of May and then lowering the mark to 9.69 seconds at the Olympics. A few days later, he set a 200 record of 19.30, taking two hundredths of a second off the mark set by Michael Johnson at the 1996 Atlanta Games.
To cap it off, the 1.96-meter (6-foot-5) Bolt helped Jamaica win gold in the 4×100 relay — again in world-record time.
“I’m Lightning Bolt. I’m not Flash Gordon or anybody,” Bolt said after the 200. “My name is Lightning Bolt.”
Two of the greatest distance runners of all time also had stellar years, with Kenenisa Bekele winning both the 5,000 and 10,000 at the Olympics. In the longer race, the Ethiopian great beat 1996 and 2000 Olympic 10,000 champion Haile Gebrselassie, who only competed in that event after opting out of the marathon because of pollution fears.
But Gebrselassie’s sixth-place finish in Beijing didn’t stop him from breaking his own world record in the marathon, lowering that mark to 2:03:59 in Berlin in September.
“I knew I can do something here in Berlin because since I started running, Berlin is my lucky city,” said Gebrselassie, a three-time Berlin Marathon champion who had set the previous world record at the race in 2007.
In women’s competition, Yelena Isinbayeva was undefeated outdoors in 2008, defending her Olympic pole vault title in Beijing with one of her four world records this year — three outside and one inside.
“I love to be alone at the top,” Isinbayeva said after raising the outdoor world record to 5.05 meters in Beijing.
Sailing scored a major coup as its television coverage of the Beijing Olympic Games was recognized as ‘The Best Sports Coverage by the Host Broadcaster’ at the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) “Olympic Golden Rings” ceremony, held last night (16 December) in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The IOC’s Olympic Golden Rings ceremony recognises the contribution made by the world of television to the success of the Olympic Games. Sailing won the gold award for The Best Sports Coverage by the Host Broadcasting Organisation, the Beijing Olympic Broadcasting (BOB). IOC President Jacques Rogge was amongst the leading figures from both the sporting and broadcasting world who attended the awards ceremony held at The Olympic Museum in Lausanne on Tuesday evening.
The competition pool for a Chicago Olympics would last about as long as a swimming world record does these days.
Chicago 2016 organizers unveiled several venue changes Friday that they say will benefit athletes and the community, and make their bid more attractive in the highly competitive international field. In addition to moving the aquatic center and making the competition pool a temporary facility, the sailing, canoe/kayaking, track cycling and BMX cycling venues all will be moved under Chicago’s retooled bid plan.
“We worked very closely with international sports federations and national governing bodies,” said Doug Arnot, Chicago 2016′s operations chief. “This plan is better for sport, better for the games and, perhaps most importantly, better for Chicago’s youth sports legacy. This plan remains very financially responsible.”
The changes will add about 5% to the budget, which remains at $4.7 billion, Chicago 2016 chairman Patrick Ryan said. That’s a bargain compared with other Summer Games; London estimates its overall costs for the 2012 Olympics will be about $16.5 billion, three times the original estimate.
The economic crisis has forced the U.S. Olympic Committee to cut its administrative costs by 10 percent in 2009, although athletes will see their funding increased by the same amount a year ahead of the 2010 Winter Games.
The proposed 2009 budget will be presented to the USOC board on Saturday, when new chairman Larry Probst runs his first meeting since succeeding Peter Ueberroth in October.
The USOC hopes to reduce its 450-member staff through attrition and by not filling open positions, chief executive Jim Scherr said Friday. He would not provide a specific number of positions to be cut.
Staff travel, meetings and professional training also will be curtailed to achieve the necessary cost reduction, USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel said.
“We’re also looking at a reorganization throughout the U.S. Olympic Committee to make us more effective and that reorganization will result in a few less people,” Scherr said.
Beijing has started selling souvenir sets of left-over grass and steel from its famed Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium for 2,900 yuan (420 dollars) each, Chinese media reported Thursday.
The packs include grass cut on the night of the Games’ closing ceremony, preserved in a clear box, and model Olympic torches made of steel that was not used for construction of the National Stadium, the Beijing News said.
There are 10,000 souvenir sets available for sale inside the Bird’s Nest, as well as various department stores around Beijing and online, the report said.
The Bird’s Nest, which seats 91,000 people, became the symbol of the Games held in August in China’s capital, attracting worldwide attention for its striking design of interlocking steel girders.
It hosted the Olympics opening and closing ceremonies, as well as athletics competition and football final.
It has since proved a hit with tourists, attracting 60,000 visitors on its October 1 opening day, and thousands of people every day since.
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