Beijing chooses 5 dolls for Olympic mascot

Fri Nov 11, 2005 8:48 AM ET

BEIJING (Reuters) - Beijing chose five stylized doll mascots for the 2008 Olympic games on Friday representing a panda, a Tibetan antelope, a swallow, a fish and the spirit of the Olympic flame.

Announced in a live nationwide broadcast with only 1,000 days to go before the opening ceremony, the mascots will join the official games slogan "One World, One Dream" and running man emblem which looks like the Chinese character for "capital".

"They reflect the cultural diversity of China as a multi-ethnic country," Liu Qi, head of the games organizing committee, said. "They represent the enthusiasm and aspirations of our people."

The mascots are called "Beibei", "Jingjing", "Huanhuan", "Yingying" and "Nini", which together mean "Beijing welcomes you."

Coloured in the five hues of the Olympic rings, they also represent the sea, forests, fire, earth and air.

Multiple mascots are not uncommon. The 2000 Sydney games had three native Australian animals and two years later in Salt Lake City a hare, coyote and bear represented the event.

"We have approved them," International Olympic Committee coordinating commission chairman Hein Verbruggen said in Beijing. "That means we like them, otherwise we wouldn't have done that."

But Tibetan groups, which campaign against Chinese rule in the mountainous land controlled by Beijing since 1950, condemned the choice of a Tibetan antelope, an animal on the verge of extinction due to hunting for its soft coat used to make shawls.

"It is wrong to misuse this freedom loving animal of the Tibetan plateau to serve the propaganda purposes of the Chinese regime," Wangpo Tethong, chair of the International Tibet Support Network Olympics Campaign Working Group, said in a statement.

The selection of China's mascots generated plenty of debate, and caused headaches for a design team trying to select something that could best represent a country which has a written history going back more than 2,000 years and much tradition to draw on.

"The most agonizing thing of all has been the design of the mascot," Han Meilin, head of design team, told the People's Daily overseas edition.   And not all Beijing residents warmed to the five dolls.

"The colors look fine together, but if I look at each separately they seem a little like the uninspiring figures from the Chinese cartoons of my childhood," said university student Zhong Ling, 21.

"I see them and I don't feel anything yet," said Du Xiaoxi, 25, an office worker out shopping in the fashionable Wangfujing district. "2008 is too far away."

Yet if unloved, they can always be fired and replaced.

Unpopular mountain goat "Chamois" at the 1992 Albertville winter games lost her footing to a fat blue snow imp called "Magique".

(Additional reporting by Guo Shipeng and Beijing newsroom)

10:13 PM - Nov. 11, 2005 - post comment