Kazakhs hope IOC impressed with Almaty winter feel

By Karolos Grohmann (Reuters) - Almaty 2022 winter Olympics bid officials said they were confident on Wednesday they had done enough to impress the International Olympic Committee, surprising them with the Kazakh city's long winter sports tradition. Almaty, which has more than 60 percent of the venues in place, is bidding against Beijing, hosts of the 2008 summer Olympics, after four other candidates, including Oslo and Stockholm, withdrew over cost concerns. The IOC, whose evaluation commission completed its four-day visit to Almaty on Wednesday, will elect the host at its session in Kuala Lumpur on July 31. "We were expecting the evaluation commission visit as a serious test for our team and in reality it was exactly that," Almaty 2022 Vice Chairman Andrey Kryukov told Reuters in an telephone interview. "For us it was the best showcase we could have with the IOC We showed them our best advantages," he said. Kryukov said the Medeo skating rink, which has hosted more world records than any other rink, the ski jumping venue and the nearby mountains make for an overall compact concept, that according to him hopefully left the IOC pleasantly surprised. "We have real snow, real venues, we are a real winter sports city. Nobody knew we were so developed in these regards," he said. "When they (IOC) saw how many people love the winter sports they understood this is an absolutely winter city. "They may not have expected such a reality from this concept." ASIAN GAMES Almaty is no stranger to winter sports, with the city building its first winter sports venue in the 1950s as it served the Soviet sports system. More recently it co-hosted with Astana the 2011 Asian winter Games. "We never said to the IOC anything they did not find or see," Kryukov said. "We want the Games to fit into the city and not the city into Games." He ruled out any white elephants, like the ones that dot the Black Sea coast of Russia's Sochi, which spent a record $51 billion on the 2014 winter Olympics but many of the venues' future are already in doubt. "The system works here. Medeo for example has 7,000 people skating every weekend. The ski resorts were full on Monday when we visited." It will not only be venues that decide who gets the nod with human rights organizations already pressing the IOC on China and Kazakhstan. A controversy over a Russian anti-gay propaganda law threatened to derail the Sochi Games with the IOC since boosting its anti-discrimination arsenal with updated principles governing the awarding of the Olympics. International rights groups have noted a deterioration of human rights in Kazakhstan, ruled by Nursultan Nazarbayev since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. "We had these questions here," Kryukov said. "We are fully supportive of the Olympic charter. We are a young country but from year to year we improve it." (editing by Justin Palmer)