INTERNATIONAL Olympic Committee (IOC) inspectors left Beijing yesterday after offering praise for the Chinese capital’s bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics that, if successful, would make it the first city to hold both the winter and summer Games.

    The inspectors’ departure follows a news conference at which Evaluation Commission chairman Alexander Zhukov affirmed Beijing’s embrace of the IOC’s goals for a more frugal, sustainable and athlete-centered Games.

    Beijing’s bid relies heavily on the experience and infrastructure gained from hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics, as well as expanding the appeal of winter sports in the world’s most populous nation.

    Beijing’s inspections and presentations appeared to go off without a hitch, although the city’s air pollution remained at high levels throughout the inspectors’ visit.

    The visit was a crucial test of Beijing’s status as the front-runner in the bid race against Almaty, Kazakhstan. The International Olympic Committee will select the host city July 31 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Norway’s Oslo and other global cities dropped out of the race after local opposition to the costs involved.

    The IOC Inspectors visited sites within Beijing, as well as the Yanqing and Zhangjiakou ski areas north of the city. As a further enticement to television audiences, some of those venues would lie beneath portions of the Great Wall of China.

    While the venues’ distance from Beijing has been a concern, organizers say a high-speed rail line now under construction will reduce the current three-hour travel time to just 50 minutes.

    Air pollution and a lack of natural snow have also been raised as issues surrounding the bid, although Beijing plans to tackle the problem by making snow, closing polluting industries and taking older vehicles off city roads. They say that would bring a 25 percent reduction in the very small and extremely unhealthy PM2.5 pollutants under a five-year plan begun in 2013.

    (SD-Agencies)