Paris announces bid for 2008 Olympic Games
Posted: Thursday December 17, 1998 11:57 AM
PARIS, France (Reuters) -- Paris, having played its part in a
successful soccer World Cup in France this year, is bidding to
stage the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.
Jean Tiberi, mayor of the French capital, made the official
announcement on Thursday after the news was leaked nine days ago
at the Asian Games in Bangkok.
"We have the ambition and the means," Tiberi told a news
conference as he named Philippe Bourguignon, owner of the Club
Mediterranee tourism organization and a sports enthusiast, as
president of the bidding committee.
"It's up to us to show Paris is a city that can express
Olympism in all its aspects," Tiberi said.
"I've never negotiated the candidature for an Olympic
Games. But I know that to win a market you can have the best
possible commercial team but if your product isn't good you
won't get there," Bourguignon said.
"So Paris, even if it bothers me to talk like this about
this city, in terms of marketing is a very good product."
The Paris bid will also have the active backing of French
former Olympic champions Guy Drut and Jean-Claude Killy,
although it is not yet clear exactly in what capacity.
Killy inspired the bid which won the 1992 Winter Olympics
for Albertville and was joint organizer of those Games.
"We had no chance on paper, yet we got them and organized
them well," he said.
"The decision will be made in June 2001 and we must go
there to win. I will lend my experience (to the bid) as the only
one to have been there at the start and the finish."
Asked about recent allegations of corruption in the bidding
for other Olympic venues, Killy said: "It's harmful to the
Olympic movement. But I don't see how that could cast a shadow
over Paris's candidature."
Drut presided over Paris's previous unsuccessful bid for the
1992 Summer Games which went to Barcelona, home city of
International Olympic Committee chairman Juan Antonio Samaranch.
Drut was sports minister in the previous government when
the northern city of Lille failed to win the 2004 Summer Games,
which went instead to Athens.
Samaranch leaked the news of the Paris bid last week in
Bangkok after being told over the telephone by French President
Jacques Chirac.
Paris, which staged the Games in 1900 and 1924, will be
competing against Kuala Lumpur, Osaka, Beijing and Toronto for
the 2008 Games.
Sydney will hold the 2000 Games.
Paris is far better equipped now to hold the Olympics than
it was when it made its bid in the 1980s for the 1992 Games.
There was, for example, no 80,000-capacity Stade de France,
venue of the country's World Cup final victory over Brazil five
months ago.
The two main facilities Paris would build for the Games are
a 10,000-capacity velodrome and an Olympic swimming pool of
similar attendance capacity, Tiberi said.
Several sites close to the Stade de France on the northern
perimeter of the capital will be studied as possible venues for
the Olympic Village.
Tiberi said Paris also had one of the best public transport
networks in the world and all the cultural and tourist
attractions and accommodation facilities of a city accustomed to
millions of visitors every year.
Its police handled crowds of more than a million on World
Youth Day in 1997 and after France's World Cup victory on July
12.
The bidding committee does not yet have a budget but will
announce one in the next few weeks.
The French sports daily L'Equipe said it would be in the
region of 100 million francs (US$16 million).
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