IOC wants more details of Beijing's plans to beat smog

BEIJING, Apr 19 (Reuters) The IOC inspection team ended a visit to Beijing today by praising 2008 Olympic organisers for making ''considerable progress'' but said they wanted more details of contingency plans to improve air quality.

Beijing is one of the most polluted cities in the world and despite huge government efforts to improve air quality, a haze of smog still regularly shrouds the city, as it did today.

''This is of the utmost importance to the athletes, who are the most important part of the Games,'' Hein Verbruggen, chairman of the International Olympic Committee (IOC)'s coordination commission, told a news conference.

''(We have requested) contingency plans, if needed, for the test events this year and also for 2008 .... (but) it is not totally clear what the effects will be.

''We have asked that the effects of the contingency plans be calculated so that we know the air will allow the athletic performances we expect to happen here.'' Beijing's notoriously congested streets are also a concern and Verbruggen said his commission had also requested more details about contingency plans to keep the traffic flowing during Games time.

''This kind of congestion, we will obviously have to avoid at Games time. But we have a lot of experience of this. Before the Athens Games it was major worry ... but in the end it worked out,'' he said. ''We still need more details but we are confident it will be sorted.'' Verbruggen said the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) must make the most of the 26 test events planned for Beijing.

''Test events this summer are a crucial opportunity the organisers must use to test how operations, planned for so long, will actually work in practice.'' Verbruggen was also pleased to report that BOCOG had started to recruit foreign experts with experience of previous Olympics in key roles.

POSITIVE MESSAGE Overall the message from the eighth visit of the coordination commission was positive.

''We have had detailed presentations on many different issues and without exception considerable progress has been made,'' Verbruggen said.

''So we are able to say they are at a level of preparation, we would expect BOCOG to be. With only 477 days to go, there is still an awful lot of work to be done. That is normal.'' Visiting the venues, he said, was an ''almost emotional experience'', adding that a delay in the construction of the showpiece ''Bird's Nest'' national stadium would still leave it completed in plenty of time.

''We have no worries whatsoever about the completion of the venues,'' he said.

The coordination commission will visit Beijing twice more before the Games open on August 8, 2008.

REUTERS BJR VV1705