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Beijing on Friday narrowly won an IOC vote for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games that secured its place in sporting history. The result of the first vote was not disclosed.

Kuala Lumpur: Beijing on Friday narrowly won an IOC vote for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games that secured its place in sporting history. Now, Beijing will be the first do it – and in the span of just 14 years. “You are taking a lot of assumptions….”

Kazakhstan, a former Soviet state, pitched itself as a model for future hosts, embracing all the new reforms with a low-cost bid in a city which already has most of the facilities in place after hosting the 2011 Asian Winter Games. And just like before and after the city was...

Beijing Mayor Wang Anshun called China’s winter, “spectacular”.

Bach congratulated Beijing on winning the right to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, and expressed his confidence on a successful delivery of the Games.

But IOC president Thomas Bach, who pushed for and got a unanimous rubber-stamp approval of Agenda 2020 at last December’s extraordinary session in Monaco, declared then that the starting gate was closed.

Du Yanlin, a Beijing activist who was recently detained for taking a selfie in Tiananmen Square to commemorate the 1989 military crackdown, said: “If the IOC wants to champion the purity of sport, it should not allow Beijing to host the Olympics”.

Well known Chinese athletes such as Yao Ming – a member of the bidding team for the games – see the awarding of the bid to Beijing as an opportunity to ignite interest in winter sports here.

This reminds me of the time when I sat in front of TV and saw Beijing was announced to be the city to host 2008 Olympic Games.

Xi expressed the Chinese government’s “strongest support” for Beijing in a video message to an worldwide Olympic Committee meeting to decide whether Beijing or Almaty, Kazakhstan, gets the 2022 Games.

An all-star team of presenters has been assembled to help Beijing make a final demonstration of its readiness to host the 2022 Winter Olympic Games and show the world its capacity to stage the winter sports gala. The voting numbers were not immediately released. Almaty claims...

In that sense, probably the most important person on the stage was Yu Zaiqing, a much-respected IOC vice-president, who brought the presentation to a close by asking his colleagues “with the greatest humility” to vote for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic and Paralympic bid.