BEIJING, 8 September 2004 — Beijing’s municipal government has scrapped plans to build five new sports venues for the 2008 Olympic Games, as it aims to cut several hundred million dollars from its Olympic budget, state media said yesterday.
The city’s Olympic organizing committee plans to enlarge existing facilities or build temporary structures instead of the five venues, China News Service said, without naming the venues or specifying which events would be affected by the changes.
Beijing is responsible for 18 of the 30 venues in the city that are earmarked for the Olympics, with the national government responsible for the other 12, the agency said.
The city will now build five new venues instead of the 10 originally planned, it said.
It will also reduce the costs of the swimming centre and the “bird’s nest” roof structure of the main Olympic stadium, the agency said.
Design changes have reduced the estimated cost of the stadium from 3.9 billion yuan ($470 million) to 2.3 billion yuan ($280 million), the China Daily newspaper said.
The city government is scheduled to make a formal report on cutting the costs of its Olympic venues to a meeting of the municipal congress tomorrow. Liu Jingmin, vice-president of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the 2008 games, last week said Beijing would try to minimize building costs while ensuring the quality of construction. The International Olympic Committee also asked China to delay the start of construction on some projects, to save maintenance and other costs.
Meanwhile, chaotic scenes greeted China’s Olympic medalists yesterday when hundreds of people gathered in Hong Kong for their first chance to glimpse the sports stars.
Screaming fans waved Chinese flags, took snaps, and jostled for position to get autographs and shake hands with their idols. Police had to steady crowd control barriers to prevent them from falling down.
It was the second day of a tour by the athletes here and the first in which the Olympians, who picked up 32 gold medals at the Athens games, the nation’s biggest ever haul, met members of the public. Critics say the trip is a ploy to boost patriotism and Chinese nationalism in the former British colony, and to give a lift to Beijing’s favored candidates in the city’s legislative elections on Sunday.
Beijing is widely believed to have begun doubting the southern Chinese enclave’s loyalties after mass protests in the past year demanded greater democracy here.
Democrats, considered by Beijing to be hostile to China’s Communist Party regime, are tipped to make big gains in the polls.
Such cynicism was hard to find, however, at the medalists’ first stop, the Golden Bauhinia Square where a monument marks the city’s return to Chinese rule from British control in 1997. Blistering heat did not deter hundreds of schoolchildren and Hong Kong and mainland visitors who arrived early in the morning to wait for a sight of the stars.
Later, the sports stars were given the sort of reception usually reserved for pop stars when they made an appearance before a crowd of some 20,000 at the Hong Kong Stadium.
Sudan to Sue Greece for Alleged Olympic Snub
Sudan said it will file a complaint against Greece in the European Court of Justice for detaining and deporting a number of Sudanese who went to Athens to attend the Olympic Games, SUNA news agency reported in Khartoum on Monday. The agency said Justice Minister Ali Mohamed Osman Yassin has instructed the governmental Consultative Council for Human Rights to pursue the case of 24 people arrested at Athens airport and deported after a week in custody without justification. The Rapporteur of the Consultative Council, Abdel Monim Osman Taha, said the council would prepare and deliver to the European Union a complaint against Greece claiming violation of Article Nine of the Universal Human Rights Convention, which prohibits the aggressive arrest of any person.
Taha added that the complaint would also contain alleged violations by Greece of the civil, political, cultural, economic and social rights provided for in the UN conventions.
He said the council would submit this complaint to the joint technical Sudanese-EU committee of the Sudanese-EU dialogue in a meeting next week.
A Greek official confirmed that a total 18 Sudanese arriving in two separate groups on flights from Amman, Jordan were detained at Athens airport on Aug. 12 and 15. They were sent back to Jordan on Aug. 19 because their papers were not in order, the official said.
