Beijing 2022 Seeks Experts for Winter Olympics Committee

(ATR) Beijing 2022 is busy recruiting winter sports experts to form its organizing committee, Around the Rings is told.

Chinese Olympic Committee vice president Gao Zhidan told ATR in Beiing that the bid committee he was involved in was transitioning to an organizing committee.

"According to the IOC evaluations we will form the organizing committee five months after the IOC Session. So we are studying this issue," Gao told ATR, speaking on the sidelines of the IAAF World Athletic Championships.

Since the Chinese capital beat Almaty to secure 2022 hosting rights on July 31, the bid team and NOC have made "a very careful review about our bidding process".

"The review is also a process for us to make very good decisions for the organizing committee," Gao said.

"Now we are trying to find some officials from Beijing, from Hebei province, also from central China… to find some professionals with rich experience of hosting games to form this organising committee.

"This is very important for us," he added. Some snow events are taking place in Zhangjiakou inHebei provincearound 200 kilometers northwest of Beijing.

Gao indicated that he didn’t expect Beijing 2022 to make any big changes to its bidding concept, in the way that Tokyo 2020 has relocated venues as part of the IOC’s cost-cutting mission.

"Since bidding for the 2022 Winter Olympics the [IOC’s] Agenda 2020 has already been released. We are doing the process in line with Agenda 2020 so I think there won’t be big changes to our venues," he said.

Gao agreed that it was important for Beijing 2022 to get off to a fast start in its preparations, insisting that the new Winter Olympics host city was already well-positioned.

"For the stadiums of Beijing 2022 we will make full use of 2008 venues and at the same time carefully study how we can build new venues... but that will be after we establish an organizing committee," he said.

IOC president Thomas Bach is holding discussions with 2022 Games organisers this week on a tour of China. Bach spent the past week in Beijing for a series of IOC meetings and talks with both the Chinese president and premier.

On his tour, he will inspect some of the 2022 Olympic sites, including Zhangjiakou, and meet the governors and party secretaries of the provinces who will be responsible for Olympic planning over the next seven years of preparations.

Reported by Mark Bisson

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