IOC President Jacques Rogge and members of the IOC Executive Board today visited the Beijing Olympic Village today, and inspected the accommodation and facilities that will be used by 10,500 athletes, officials and coaches during the Olympic Games.

 

The IOC’s ‘Giving is Winning’ campaign, which is a project of the IOC in collaboration with the UNHCR, was also launched and the Olympic Truce Peace Wall was inaugurated.

 

‘Beautiful’ apartments
The Village covers 556,000 square metres and consists of 42 apartment buildings and 12 service buildings. “The village is wonderful, simply fantastic,” said President Rogge, “we ate the same lunch as the athletes in the canteen, and it was great quality – the highest quality. Same for the apartments, and the beautiful grounds and gardens, the facilities here on every level are simply fantastic.”

 

IOC Vice-President Gunilla Lindberg agreed “this is probably the best Olympic village there’s been so far, there’s been a lot of time devoted to it so the landscaping is very mature, everything is just very well-finished.”

 

Both athletes and officials united in praising the village: “The food here is great - there’s a great variety and it’s beautifully made and presented,” said Carol Rodriguez, a 400m sprinter from Puerto Rico, “there’s Chinese, Asian, pizza, salads, great desserts – whatever you want.” Great Britain’s Deputy Chef de Mission, Sir Clive Woodward added: “This is a great village, the place is really well built and the apartments are really well equipped – I can’t really see how it could be better.”

 

Members of the IOC, including Gerhard Heiberg, Princess Haya Bint al Hussein, Richard Carrion, Juan Antonio Samaranch and Mario Vasquez Rana, were shown the Village’s Polyclinic, which provides the very latest medical support technology to the individual teams housed in the village.

 

Banks, shops, a library, entertainment complex as well as swimming pools, running tracks and exercise facilities are among the services that athletes will be able to use throughout the Games period at the village.

 

Learn more on Beijing 2008

The IOC has always encouraged the Beijing 2008 organisers to provide media with the fullest access possible to report on the Olympic Games, including access to the internet.

 

In light of internet access problems which were experienced this week by media in the Olympic Games Main Press Centre in Beijing, the IOC – namely Chairman of the Beijing 2008 IOC Coordination Commission Hein Verbruggen and Olympic Games Executive Director Gilbert Felli – held meetings and discussions today with Games organizers (BOCOG) and Chinese authorities.

 

The issues were put on the table and the IOC requested that the Olympic Games hosts address them. We understand that BOCOG will give details to the media very soon of how the matter has been addressed. We trust them to keep their promise.

 

The IOC would like to stress that no deal with the Chinese authorities to censor the internet has ever in any way been entered into.

 

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For further information, please contact the IOC Communications:

 

A double-sculls crew will compete under the Iraqi flag at the 2008 Beijing Games. This welcome news brings the Iraqi team up to four, including a sprinter and a discus-thrower.

This follows an agreement reached on Tuesday by the IOC and the Iraqi government, which has cleared the way for Iraqi participation in the Olympic Games in Beijing: The two Iraqi rowers places had originally been reallocated to the North Korean National Olympic Committee (NOC) after the Iraqis missed the deadline for entering a team. The North Korean NOC declined the offer and the places have therefore been returned to the Iraqi rowers.

 

 Learn more on Beijing 2008

Series on Olympic Scholarship Holders, Beijing 2008. Today: Zeina Shaban.

After 14 years as a table tennis player, Zeina Shaban is about to take part in her second Olympic Games, flying the flag for Jordan. You could be forgiven for thinking that, after such a lengthy time in the game, it might be her last Olympic Games – but when the Games begin Shaban will barely be 20.

Meeting Deng Yaping
She first picked up a bat aged six, and two years later, at the Atlanta Olympic Games, she was bitten by the table tennis bug when she was introduced  to the then world champion, Deng Yaping of China. “It’s the speed and the adrenalin, and the constant ups and downs in every game,” she said. “You can be winning, then you’re losing, then you’re winning again. It’s a rollercoaster, and that’s what I like about it.”

Under-14 champion aged nine
Her early results were promising, to say the least. She won Jordan’s Under-14 Championship as a nine-year-old before winning the American Open and Sweden’s Safirs Tournament for Under-10s. After that she travelled to Europe and China to improve her skills whilst competing on the ITTF World Junior Circuit, ITTF Pro Tour and at both the Liebherr World Individual Championships and World Team Championships.

Athlete of the year
By 2003, at the grand old age of 15, Shaban was a seasoned veteran. Named Jordan’s athlete of the year, ahead of footballer Mahmoud Shilbayeh among others, she was awarded the prestigious King Hussein Medal for Achievement by His Majesty King Abdullah II following her qualification for the Athens Olympic Games, where she reached the last 64. This time she hopes to go at least one stage further, but two years’ studying economics in England has placed serious demands on her time.

“Table tennis has made me who I am”
“I grew up playing table tennis, so it has become part of me,” she said. “On top of that, representing my country has always been an honour, and representing my country in the Olympic Games is an even bigger honour. Table tennis has brought me a lot of things that I’m proud of, and it has made me who I am today. It’s shaped my character in a lot of ways, and I’m sure I’ll always carry that with me.”

For the Beijing Olympic Games, Olympic Solidarity awarded a total of 1,088 scholarships to 166 National Olympic Committees in 21 individual Olympic sports.



Factsheet

 Olympic Solidarity

 Learn more about The Olympic Solidarity Commission
 www.beijing2008.com

Beijing’s historic cultural icons are already celebrating golden times, even before the start of the Olympic Games. The long-awaited event has been the catalyst which has sparked a massive renovation programme for ancient buildings and monuments in and around China’s capital. Over the past eight years, more than one billion yuan (about USD 140 million) has been spent sprucing up some of Beijing’s most important cultural and historic relics ready for the influx of athletes, visitors and media for the Olympic Games.

According to Kong Fanzhi, Director of the Beijing Cultural Relics Protection Bureau, the sum is equivalent to the total amount spent on protecting the city’s cultural heritage in the 110 years up to 1990. The restoration programme has included renovations to several UNESCO World Heritage List sites – the Summer Palace, Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Peking Man Site and the Ming Tombs. Work has also been carried out on imperial parks, religious buildings and traditional hutong residential alleyways, and involved the reconstruction of the Ming-era Yongdingmen Gate, demolished in 1957, as part of the restoration of Beijing’s 7.8km central axis.  

Two major Olympic venues – the National Stadium (Bird’s Nest) and National Aquatics Centre (Water Cube) – even had to be moved after the discovery of two ancient temples during construction on their original sites. Recent weeks have seen the reopening of the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the largest building in the Forbidden City, as well as the 14th-century Imperial College and Confucian Temple, located in the Yonghe Lamasery. “Based on decades of experience, we believe the best calling card for Beijing is traditional culture, rather than modernity,” said Fanzhi, at the reopening of the lamasery buildings.

UNESCO has monitored restoration work on the listed World Heritage Sites and organised a consultation in May 2007 between Chinese authorities, their conservation experts and those of the United Nations agency and international advisory bodies to discuss conservation techniques at the Forbidden City to ensure the authenticity of the site was being maintained.

 

Heritage in the forefront: still a huge task
Beatrice Kaldun, Programme Specialist for Culture in UNESCO’s Beijing office credited the “huge efforts” made by authorities in China in recent years, reflected in the types of World Heritage Sites such as the newly-created cultural site of Fujian Tulou, with its traditional round houses. “However, to bring heritage in the forefront is important and also good economics is still a task ahead of us, and China is not alone in this,” she added. “Indeed that is a difficult, but also interesting and important task of UNESCO to make heritage and its protection and importance an issue for everyone, including young people, rather than for a select group of experts and caretakers.”