Olympic apartments won't be 'white elephant,' IOC chief says

Chicago, Madrid and other bidders for the 2016 Olympics should continue to plan thousands of apartments for athletes even with the collapse of house prices, Gilbert Felli, the International Olympic Committee executive director, said.

Chicago, where downtown condo sales plunged 84 percent last year, is working on an Olympic Village in Grant Park. Spain, which has almost 1 million empty homes, plans construction near the Madrid airport. An alternative is to house athletes in student accommodation.

"The Olympic Village is not a White Elephant," Felli said in a telephone interview from Lausanne, Switzerland. "It's probably one of the easiest things to deal with maybe two, three or four years after the Games."

Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo, the other candidates, also outlined new athlete accommodation in bid books submitted to the IOC last month. IOC members will vote on who will hold the 2016 Games on Oct. 2 in Copenhagen.

Vancouver, the 2010 Winter Games host, had its credit rating cut by Standard & Poor's last week after guaranteeing the athletes' village when private lending dried up amid the credit crunch. London, the 2012 Summer Games host, is using contingency funds to finance its village.

"At the time of those bids we didn't understand we had a financial crisis" ahead, Felli said.

Some 55 percent of the apartments at the Olympic Village at last year's Beijing Games had been sold by mid-September, according to the latest available data from the Beijing Municipal Construction Committee.

Student accommodation was used for athletes most recently at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Felli said.