Word: ioc
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...Beijing Bags It China gets its coveted 2008 Olympics. Now--can it pull them off? Jubilation on the Streets of Beijing Cell Phone from Beijing: TIME's Matt Forney reports from celebrations in Tiananmen Square Beijing Gets the Games TIME's Olympic veteran Barry Hillenbrand weighs in on the IOC's decision--and what it means for athletes and spectators...
...While a number of U.S. legislators have urged that Beijing be denied the Games on human-rights grounds, they're unlikely to win much support either from the majority of IOC delegates or even from the Bush administration. Although the administration has not yet taken any position on the issue, it is believed to see a move to deny Beijing the Games as a symbolic move that would alienate China's population without achieving much tangible benefit...
...latest IOC report is essentially a technical assessment of each city's readiness to mount an Olympic-scale spectacle - Istanbul and Osaka fared badly on this score, making them rank outsiders - ahead of a July vote by IOC members to award the games. Although political considerations are not supposed to weigh directly in IOC deliberations, delegates won't be unaware of the political implications of their choice. Beijing has made hosting the Olympiad a diplomatic priority, particularly after it lost to Sydney in the bid for 2000. And that vote reveals the complex politics of the voting process, in which...
...even if the Bush administration wanted to stop the Games going to Beijing, it would struggle to prevail in the IOC on the basis of a directly political agenda. The Olympic movement suffered heavily from the tit-for-tat boycotts of 1980 and 1984, when the U.S. and the Soviets refused to attend each other's Olympiads, and delegates may be leery of allowing geopolitical conflict to determine the movement's agenda. And direct criticism of China on human rights grounds tends to be confined to Western nations. Taking the recent defeat of the U.S. in an election...
...Chinese leadership would be restrained from risking a Tiananmen Square-type crackdown if their prized Olympiad was at stake. So, with most observers holding Beijing as the slight favorite over Paris and Toronto, the China-bashers, human rights advocates, Tibetan independence campaigners and others who hope to stop the IOC awarding it the games are probably not going to prevail. But in the (likely) event their efforts to stop China getting the Games are defeated, the opportunities to promote their causes afforded by a Beijing Olympiad may yet turn such a defeat into a blessing...