Visiting another Olympic and Paralympic host city is a bit like time travel. Last week we were in Beijing visiting our counterparts in the Beijing 2008 Organising Committee (BOCOG) who are doing the same job as us, but four years ahead.
The Beijing 2008 brand at the Great Wall of China:
It is immediately very daunting seeing the scale of the task so close to Games time, and also exciting to see the final stages of venue construction and the stage taking shape.
The principal new venues are simply grand. Indeed the scale of the Beijing Olympic development is immense: the Olympic Forest Park at the northern end of the Olympic Green covers some 680 hectares of newly created greenspace. This is nearly three times bigger than the entire London Olympic Park site.
Other venues are more comparable in scale and each has its special character. We liked the Beach Volleyball venue, originally designed as a temporary arena but now to be kept as a permanent facility. It is well integrated into the surrounding parkland and they have made clever use of some existing old factory buildings (brick built unusually) to serve as back-of-house facilities at Games time, and as artist studios in legacy. Its energy use is supported by a large solar array that swivels to track the sunshine:
We were equally impressed with the BOCOG offices; whereas in London we currently occupy 3 floors in Canary Wharf, the BOCOG HQ is about the size of our whole building, with some 2000 or more staff working there. The staff canteen, with private dining rooms for special occasions are a far cry from our sandwich trolley. But the basic workspaces could just as easily have been back home, although BOCOG staff seem to have lots more pot plants around them.
Our main purpose in visiting Beijing was to attend the 7th World Conference on Sport and Environment, a biennial event co-hosted by the IOC and United Nations Environment Programme. This is a fascinating opportunity to learn about how other major events and sports organisations are addressing green issues, and for the current organising committees – Beijing, Vancouver, London and Sochi – to compare notes and present their programmes.
A new feature this year was the prominence of sponsors; another sign of how the corporate sector is becoming more and more involved in sustainability and actively engaged in host city environmental projects.
The big topic of the conference was carbon management. IOC President Jacques Rogge opened the conference by announcing that climate change has become one of the most important issues of the 21st century, and this theme continued to dominate throughout the two and a half days of the conference.
