POSTED: 2012-02-22 12:02:22
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
LAURA WALDEN / Sports Features Communications
TAMPA: The Doha 2020 team has taken a different approach this time to dealing with the prickly question of temperatures by moving the Games’ time to October 2-18. The Paralympic Games will be moved to November 4-15 after the Olympics.
The other point in play is that the Doha 2020 team can juggle certain events during the day to best accommodate heat factors. Some of the more strenuous events could be planned early morning or later in the evening after the sun goes down working with the drop in temperature.
According to the Weather Channel, October in Doha is also the driest month of the year and the lack of humidity will help cut the heat with the lows at 74 F and highs at 95 F with the mean coming in at 86F.
Bid vice-chairman, Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, gave clarifications on how the bid plan will affront the main obstacle that shortlisted them out of the 2016 bid race. Last time around the IOC executive committee cut the Qatar bid due to a request to change the two week window of the Games.
This bid process the IOC has asked for any requests of this type up front last September when the NOCs submitted their intent to bid. This was in order to deal with these sort of requests in the very early stages in order to space bid cities the expense and work of taking a bid plan forward only to have it axed mid cycle.
Al-Thani spoke about the new approach to dealing with the elevated temperatures in Doha and how they have strived to find a solution.
He said, “The IOC has asked us for the information for bid cities who would like to bid outside the normally requested period.
“We already contacted all the 28 summer Olympic international sports federations and we got their approval for us to move our proposal from July-August to 2-18 October.
“The second thing that we talked about was the heat and moving the dates to October makes our weather conditions comparable to those of the other bidding cities at their proposed time. This also applied to other host cities temperatures and climates during Games’ time.
Deputy ceo, Fahad Juma, the technical director and project management, added, “The weather conditions in October will be ideal to host a compact and memorable edition of the Games.
Doha will be competing against Baku, Istanbul, Madrid, and Tokyo for the 2020 summer Games.
The final decision will be voted in Buenos Aires, Argentina on September 7, 2013.
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