Pyeongchang Touts New Horizons and Lessons Learned in 2018 Bid Presentation

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(ATR) Pyeongchang 2018 bid chairman Yang Ho Cho tells Around the Rings "We did our best" following the Korean city's pitch for the Winter Olympics at SportAccord.

"We tried to send our message consistently and clearly about Pyeongchang and the new horizons. I hope they received our message," he told ATR after the presentation.

The Korean city, which is bidding for a third time for the Games following failed 2010 and 2014 campaigns, sent a strong message to the IOC in their presentation. The main thrust of the pitch was that the city had been refining its plans for a decade in order to achieve its dream.

Pyeongchang was the last of the three 2018 Olympic candidates to present to delegates Thursday; Munich and Annecy took the stage at SportAccord in the morning session.

A video bearing the "New Horizons" slogan kicked off Pyeongchang's half-hour presentation before 400 delegates gathered at the convention.

Paying lip service to the slogan, Cho told delegates: "Pyeongchang is a new story for the Olympic Movement, using the lessons of the past and looking forward to new horizons. It's a historic chance for the Olympic Movement."

Korean sports minister Byoung Gug Choung ran with the theme, saying that the country's government had made winning the bid campaign "a national priority".

"We have been working for 10 years to make Pyeongchang a winter sports hub," he said.

"In previous bids we made a commitment to the IOC and I'm proud to say we kept every promise we made."

Choung also announced a new landmark investment to help promote winter sports in Korea and develop a new generation of winter sports athletes.

A total of $500 million will be invested from 2012 to 2018 in the "Drive the Dream" program. The cash injection will partly be spent on upgrading and building new competition venues and training centers that can be made available to all levels of winter sports athletes.

"We want to give 650 million young people in new markets the opportunity and access to enjoy winter sport," Cho said, before making a direct appeal to the seven international winter federations.

"We want to grow and diversify the financial support for winter IFs and sport through new investment from new regions."

Both of Korea's IOC members, Dae Sung Moon and Kun Hee Lee, were on hand Thursday for the bid.Moon joined the speaker line-up, which also included Pyeongchang 2018's director of sports Kwang Bae Kang, a four-time winter Olympian, and communications director Theresa Rah.

A video on the venues plan was supported by comments made by Kang, who repeated the mantra of this particular bid presentation that the city had listened to the IOC following its two failed bids.

"We have done our homework, through 10 years of bidding to make sure Pyeongchang 2018 is the most athlete-focused. Shorter times to venues is the number one concern for great Games," he said.

He noted that 90 percent of athletes would be within 5-10 minutes of their competition venues and the other 10 percent with a 30-minute travel time to compete in their sports.

Another headline figure was dropped by Rah, who remarked that of the 21 Winter Olympics, only two had been held in Asia and none in South Korea.

It brought to mind the statistic that South America had never hosted an Olympics that was repeated time and time again by the Rio 2016 Olympic bid in its final months of campaigning.

Bid consultant Mike Lee worked for Rio and is one of the international advisers forPyeongchang along with U.S. consultants TerrenceBurns and Charlie Battle.

One other key announcement came in the Korean bid pitch.

Pyeongchang plans to introduce an advisory program for international federations and one for NOCs, starting next year and running through 2017.

The purpose of these initiatives is to provide annual travel assistance to these Olympic stakeholders to send representatives to Pyeongchang to meet with the city's sport and venue planners and to offer their advice in further development of the Olympic plan.

Athlete representation came in the form of a video featuring Olympic gold medalist Kim Yu-Na, who could not be at SportAccord because she is busy training for the figure skating world champs that take place in Moscow later this month.

Written and reported in London by Mark Bisson