A week into the Beijing Olympic Games, athletes brim with praise for the Olympics venues, and the Games are seen as a "clear success", the McClatchy newspapers reported Friday.
Athletes and several International Olympic Committee (IOC) members thought "China has reason for pride at how the 29th Olympic Games are unfolding." They laud the world-class facilities, precision organization and the hospitality of armies of Chinese volunteers, according to the newspapers.
"The organization and everything else ... is just unreal. The accommodation, the food is lovely ... It's absolutely super," Kenny Egan, Ireland's light heavyweight boxer who qualified yesterday for the Olympic quarter-finals with a 10-2 dismissal of Turkey's Bahram Muzaffer, was quoted as saying.
"The organization was perfect," Austria's women's volleyballer Doris Schwaiger was reported as saying, "I haven't found anything that is not okay."
The newspapers also praised Chinese government's anti-pollution measures that have cleared Beijing's streets of much of its traffic and lessened the smog.
"Friday was the clearest day of the games with a cloudless sky and vistas of the western hills on Beijing's outskirts," depicted the reports.
Arne Ljungqvist, the IOC chief medical official, also said Friday in Beijing that "the recent several days have had very good conditions indeed."
(Xinhua News Agency August 15, 2008)