IOC Urges London to Prepare Early

[richard]

Organizers of the 2012 London Olympics were urged Thursday to avoid the mistakes and chronic delays by Greece in the years leading to the Athens Games.

Denis Oswald, head of the IOC commission overseeing London's preparations, said both organizations want to learn from the 2004 Olympics.

"They were waiting too much until they really started to work," Oswald said Thursday at a news conference in connection with a two-day planning seminar. "Athens was a city that needed much more work than a modern city like Atlanta (in 1996), so you had more work to do and less time to do it."

"So the task was very difficult," he added. "London also has a lot to do. A clear lesson which was given and which was clearly understood by the beginning by London is that no single day should be lost because seven years to organize a games is not too much."

This is the first time the International Olympic Committee has organized such a seminar so soon after a Summer Games was awarded. London got the Olympics on July 6, beating Paris, Madrid, New York and Moscow in the IOC vote in Singapore.

Oswald said London had made a "very, very good start." He said Athens had taken 11 months to form an organizing committee while London had done so within two months of winning the bid.

"This shows the commitment of all involved, including the government, not to lose one day in order to make sure the games will implemented the way they should be," Oswald said. "Learning from the past is certainly a key element to future successes."

Oswald said members of the IOC coordination commission were not "inspectors."

"We are partners of the organizing committee and we are coming here to bring our experience and to share the common goal," he said. "We sit in the same boat and we row in the same direction."

Oswald was joined by Gilbert Felli, the IOC's executive director, London organizing chief Sebastian Coe and Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell.

Jowell said the British government is determined to contain Olympic costs. The operating budget for the games is $2.6 billion, but that doesn't count several billion in construction, infrastructure and transit projects.

"We're absolutely focused to keeping to time and keeping within costs because delays cost money," Jowell said.


Source
KRYSTYNA RUDZKI
A service of the Associated Press(AP)