Intro:

International Olympic Committee (IOC) members commented on the battle between Almaty, Kazakhstan and Beijing, China to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, following official bid presentations in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Script:

SOUNDBITE (English) John Coates, IOC vice president, Australia:

"They (the Almaty delegation) addressed the negative of not having the hotel rooms in one hit by just saying: 'Well, the prime minister says that we have 75 billion dollars in our reserve, in our sovereign fund, and this will all happen.' It's clearly a very wealthy country, but they were also able to show that it's clearly a very unique winter bid and the particularly strength is the concentration of the venues."

SOUNDBITE (English) John Coates, IOC vice president, Australia:

"In their presentation, they (the Chinese delegation) addressed what they had to do and that is the question of natural snow. They showed us how the water can be moved from the south to the north, and they addressed the question of the distances by showing us the quality of the high speed rail network that's going to be in place, the distance... the time that it's going to take to get there."

SOUNDBITE (English) Alex Gilady, IOC Member, Israel:

"I was quite surprised to learn yesterday that the whole idea of the Beijing bid came from the train to Mongolia and suddenly this train went through the mountains and they say: 'We are 20 minutes away from Beijing, we can do and become the first city to host both summer and winter (Olympics).'"

SOUNDBITE (English) Craig Reedie, IOC vice president, Great Britain:

"I mean, there's an argument on artificial snow as opposed to natural snow. Most people would think it's better to have natural snow, but the skiing experts will tell you that in downhill racing it's better to have artificial snow. So where do we go?"