An IOC group, led by Hein Verbruggen - the Chairman of the IOC’s Coordination Commission for the Beijing Games, has just completed two-and-a-half weeks of observations of the Good Luck Beijing Sports Events in order to gauge the state of planning and preparations ahead of next year’s Games. The group, which also included members of the Coordination Commission and the IOC’s administration, visited 11 of the sports events taking place this month. The overall reaction from athletes taking part in these events has been positive, and the IOC delegation was also pleased with the progress that has been made in Games preparations by the Beijing 2008 Organising Committee (BOCOG). BOCOG will now take away the lessons that they learn from these events in order to improve planning for the Games themselves next year.

The events visited by the IOC observer group included the Good Luck Beijing International Hockey Tournament alongside invitational and open events in other sports. In order to host the Good Luck Beijing Sports Events, a number of Olympic venues have been completed over the past few weeks and handed over in time for the events to take place. Across the board, the Beijing Games organizers have won praise for the quality of these new venues, and with the lessons learned from these events they will undoubtedly be even better at Games time.

During the visit, a half-day project review was also held with the IOC delegation, to look at a number of general Games areas, such as sport, transport, logistics, ticketing and construction, and to recap on some of the lessons to be learned from the sports events. BOCOG also ran simulation exercises to test out their Main Operations Centre procedures, which will be crucial to the success of the Beijing Games. The importance of these exercises was underlined by the fact that BOCOG President Liu Qi and the Mayor of Beijing, Wang Qishan, both took part in them.

Source: IOC