Word: olympiad
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...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 each round eliminates the city with the least number of votes. Beijing won the three-way vote against Sydney and Manchester, but when...
...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 for the U.N. Human Rights Commission as an indicator...
...then there's the countervailing view, which holds that awarding the Games to Beijing would actually force it to be on best behavior for the next seven years - some in Washington argue that the 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...
...agonizingly slow crawl up the 70-meter waterfall. A small engineering problem had caused "some extraordinary adrenaline rushes" among the organizers, said master of ceremonies Ric Birch. But by evening's end, the ring of fire was in place, and with it burned all the promise of the 27th Olympiad...
...Spitzer is plainly a noble and lovable human being, and the viewer is struck not only by the senselessness of his death but also by the honor and courage with which he and his colleagues conducted themselves in the face of death. The Munich Olympiad was sandwiched between two bloody wars in which the Jewish state fought for its survival, and its athletes and coaches were clearly part of a nation prepared for war. Confronted by armed men speaking Arabic, they appear to immediately understand the situation and some are even able to quickly make tactical choices - such...