By Yoon Chul
PYEONGCHANG, Gangwon Province ― Delegates from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) kicked off their inspection of venues and facilities of PyeongChang in the city’s bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics.
In the second-day inspection, the 14-member team, led by former IOC vice president Gunilla Lindberg, first visited the ski jumping hill at the Alpensia Resort in PyeongChang, off 180 kilometers east of Seoul. in Gangwon Province.
Once PyeongChang hosts the Olympics, the ski jumping venue, which features a grandstand at the bottom of the hill, will host the opening and closing ceremonies.
The venue can accommodate up to 60,000 people for the Olympic events, according to officials from the bid committee.
The IOC delegates also looked around venues for cross-country skiing and the biathlon at Alpensia; freestyle skiing and snowboarding at Bokwang Phoenix Park resort, about 30 minutes from Alpensia; and alpine skiing at Yongpyong Resort, adjacent to Alpensia. They and visited the international broadcasting center and the main press center.
At these venues, former Olympic athletes and technical experts were scheduled to hold presentations before the evaluators. But the press was banned from covering the presentations at the request of the IOC inspection team, according to a committee official.
Dozens of photographers, cameramen and writers crowded the presentation at the ski jumping hill, where Oh Kap-jin, a sports marketing professor at Kyungdong University, explained to IOC inspectors how the site would be operated if the Winter Games were held here.
Then as the IOC delegation walked over to the biathlon and cross-country venues, photographers and broadcasting cameramen walked among the officials, much to the visible dismay of Cho Yang-ho, PyeongChang bid committee chief, and Kim Jin-sun, a special envoy for PyeongChang's bidding efforts.
If selected as host, PyeongChang would run the Olympics in two major clusters: the Alpensia cluster, centered around the Alpensia Resort, would host snow events such as alpine skiing and ski jumping, and also the sliding sports of luge, bobsledding and skeleton, while the coastal cluster, in the eastern area of PyeongChang, would be home to ice events, including hockey, speed skating and figure skating.
This is the third straight Winter Games bid for PyeongChang, which lost out to Vancouver of Canada, and Sochi of Russia, in its two previous bids. On Wednesday, PyeongChang bid officials gave presentations for more than eight hours, covering topics such as their Olympic vision, athletes and venues, accommodations and the environment.
IOC member Lee Kun-hee met the evaluation team at the Bokwang Phoenix Park Resort, which would hold the snowboarding and freestyle skiing events.
“The circumstances for Korea are better than four years ago,” Lee said. “If we put in a little more effort, we can win,” he added.
The IOC delegation is scheduled to give a closing press conference on Saturday. Under IOC rules, the evaluators aren't permitted to speak with media until Saturday's press event, and all presentations will be held behind closed doors.
The IOC's evaluation reports will be made public no later than one month before the Durban meeting. While positive evaluation reports don't always guarantee victory for candidates, they are used as a reference for technical aspects of bids.