Morning swimming finals set for Beijing

The swimming finals and much of the gymnastics at the 2008 Beijing Olympics will be held in the morning, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said yesterday.

The competition schedule for the Games had finally been agreed by the IOC's executive board "after a thorough consultation process", IOC coordination commission chairman Hein Verbruggen said at a news conference.

The team and all-round individual events in the gymnastics are set for the morning, although the individual apparatus events will be contested in evening sessions.

All the track and field finals will take place in the evening with the customary exception of the marathon.

The proposed morning shift for the swimming finals had caused uproar when the news was leaked earlier this year, with some swimmers accusing the IOC of putting the interests of US broadcaster NBC before the needs of the athletes.

"I would like to deny that we are doing the bidding of certain broadcasters," Verbruggen said.

"It has always been like this, the schedule is always the result of a thorough consultation process and what comes out of this is a compromise."

Verbruggen also said the international federations responsible for the sports, which run the events at Games, had agreed the schedules.

Morning finals in Beijing mean prime-time audiences in the US for NBC, which paid $3.55 billion for the exclusive North American media rights to the 2000-2008 Games.

Swimming is a big draw for American audiences and the US team led by Michael Phelps, who won six gold medals in Athens in 2004, enjoy a great rivalry with the Australian team.

Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates said he had raised the matter with IOC president Jacques Rogge.

"We expressed a concern for the well-being of the athletes having to swim heats late at night and then returning to the pool the following morning to swim finals," he said.

But Coates added that Australian swimmers were professional athletes and that he was confident they would "focus on getting the job done in Beijing".

An IOC spokeswoman said the decision was only made after they had been convinced the physiology of athletes would not be affected, and that they had thoroughly discussed the move with their athletes commission.