SI.com - Olympics - Expectations especially high for Beijing in '08 - Wednesday February 22, 2006 11:41PM: "Even before they're over, the Winter Games in Turin are being overshadowed by Beijing, with expectations soaring that the 2008 Summer Olympics will be like none other.
Beijing Games organizers can be found at venues all over Turin, videotaping security procedures and working in ticketing offices, methodically adjusting the playbook for 2008."
Friday, February 24, 2006
Expectations especially high for Beijing in '08
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Even before they're over, the Winter Games in Turin are being overshadowed by Beijing, with expectations soaring that the 2008 Summer Olympics will be like none other.
Beijing Games organizers can be found at venues all over Turin, videotaping security procedures and working in ticketing offices, methodically adjusting the playbook for 2008.
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Executives with Johnson & Johnson, conspicuous in identical company coats, are touring the city, scouting for marketing ideas for China. The company only became an Olympic sponsor in July, too late to do much in Turin, executives said.
"The Beijing Games are like the Olympics to the power of two," said Scott Kronick, head of China operations for Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, who spent a week in Turin scouting ways his clients could use the Beijing Games to promote themselves.
Even for an event prone to hype, the buzz over Beijing is truly Olympic. Major players, from the International Olympic Committee to the corporate sponsors who help fund the games, anticipate that the first ever Olympics in China will generate more attention and more money and lend new energy to the 110-year-old movement.
The Beijing Games offer an irresistible combination, bringing together the globally popular sporting extravaganza with a China that is a fast growing large economy and a rapidly rising geopolitical presence.
Beijing will host the first Olympics held in a developing nation in 20 years. For the IOC and Olympic sponsors, that means the opportunity to tap a new, increasingly affluent market of avid sports fans and consumers.
Few hosts have as much riding on the games as Beijing. Past Olympics have been billed as coming-out parties -- think 1964 in Tokyo or 2000 for Australia -- to announce the host's arrival on the world stage. Turin saw the games as an opportunity to refashion its image from a rust-belt manufacturing center to a tourist and convention destination. But China's communist government hopes 2008 will transform its relationship with the world and with its own people.
"We want to convey the image of a China that is more open and that is making progress," Jiang Xiaoyu, a senior official with the Beijing organizing committee, told reporters in Turin.
The two and a half years before the games open are unlikely to be trouble-free. Beijing resembles a huge construction zone, its streets clogged with traffic, its air with pollution. Human rights issues may intrude; in Turin, Tibetans and members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement staged low-key protests against civil rights abuses by the Chinese government. Concerns persist about whether international media will be able to operate freely in China come 2008.
But China is no longer the dour, controlled society of a generation ago, as evidenced by its athletes in Turin. Figure skater Zhang Dan's tumble to the ice at the start of her pairs routine only to come back flawlessly to win silver was a crowd-pleasing highlight. When 20-year-old short track speed skater Wang Meng took China's first gold medal of the games, she jumped up on the awards podium before the announcer called her name. "I couldn't contain my excitement," she said afterward.
Beijing is setting itself up to be what Turin is not, rigorously planned and wildly enthusiastic. Turin's people have been criticized as lackluster fans. The city's $3.4 billion spending on the Olympics has been utilitarian, upgrading the 1930s era Stadio Comunale for the opening and closing ceremonies and building the Olympic Village for athletes on the site of a 70-year-old fruit and vegetable market.
By contrast, though summer games are three to four times the scale of winter ones, Beijing will spend more than 10 times what Turin did. It's dotting the skyline with signature structures -- a $380 million National Stadium covered in a bird's nest-like lattice of steel, a nearly $2 billion new terminal and runway for the airport. Beijing has five mascots, compared with Turin's two.
The sense is of a city charged up and in overdrive, causing Chinese journalist Wang Xiaofeng to joke about it on his blog: "Beijing will stage the best Olympics, with the most people, the most events, the most themes, the most mascots, the most money spent, the most doping rumors, the most money-losing and the most influential in the history of the Olympic Games."
Beijing's preparations will speed up in coming weeks. The organizing committee, which has taken in $1 billion in sponsorship, is expected to issue two contracts, one to an international public relations company, the other for ticketing systems. Over the next nine months, $1 billion in Olympic-related contracts will be issued, said Peter Foss of General Electric Co., an Olympics sponsor which has reorganized staff to win more games business.
GE, which had $5 billion in revenues in China last year, wants to double that amount by 2008, Foss said, and "the Olympics is one way we can speed up the process."
IOC officials, which have expressed full confidence in the Chinese efforts, have told Beijing to slow down construction, lest venues be completed too early and increase operating and maintenance costs.
The former IOC president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, summed the situation up succinctly, telling his Chinese hosts at a Turin reception:
"Beijing will stage the most successful Olympic Games in history."
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