Beijing Olympic organisers said on Thursday they were confident that athletes would compete in clean air next year despite revelations that events could be postponed because of pollution.
”We are well aware of the challenges but we are confident that air quality will be good for the Olympics,” Beijing Olympic organising committee (Bocog) spokesperson Sun Weide said.
”We have been working hard on this problem and the signs are that our work has been effective.”
Sun was speaking in response to comments from International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge on Wednesday that events could be rescheduled at the Games if pollution was extremely bad.
Rogge, who leaves Beijing on Thursday after taking part in one-year countdown celebrations, said that pollution should not pose a problem for athletes competing in sports with a short duration.
”But definitely the endurance sports like the cycling race, where you have to compete for six hours, these are examples of competitions that might be postponed or delayed to another day,” he said.
Beijing is one of the world’s most polluted cities and poor air quality has long been a top concern for athletes and officials.
Those concerns were exacerbated as a weeks-long smoggy haze that reduced visibility to just a few hundred metres on occasions marred the build-up to Wednesday’s one-year countdown celebrations.
But the air cleared marginally on Wednesday night for the main one-year countdown festivities, and Beijingers on Thursday enjoyed one of their most pollution-free days of the summer, highlighting the unpredictability facing Olympic organisers.
Bocog’s Sun highlighted that Beijing had spent $15-billion since 1998 on measures to improve air quality in the city.
This has included shutting down or moving more than 200 polluting factories out of the capital and replacing coal with natural gas for industrial boilers and homes.
The government says the efforts are having an impact, with the city last year enjoying 241 ”blue-sky” days. A decade ago the city had fewer than 100 clear sky days a year.
But stubborn air quality problems remain, and the city is regularly shrouded in a chemical smog that carries serious health risks.
Experts blame the problem partly on massive construction sites across Beijing that spew dust particles into the air, as well as coal-fired power plants and other heavy industries that continue to operate outside the city.
But they also say that Beijing can do little to improve its air quality alone, because much of the pollution comes from the heavily industrialised region surrounding the capital.
Beijing’s fast-rising car population is the other major factor. The city now has three million cars, a number that is rising by 1 200 every day.
Olympic officials say they are determined to tackle that problem by taking one million cars off Beijing’s streets during the Olympics, a plan that was adopted for several days last year during a Sino-Africa summit, and saw pollution levels plunging.
Even so, some athletes expected in Beijing for the Games are taking no chances.
The Australians and some of Britain’s Olympic athletes have said they will stay away from Beijing as long as possible and leave the city as soon as their events are over.
Australia’s Olympic chief John Coates, in Beijing earlier this week, said bad air was ”probably the biggest issue for us and the team”. — AFP
