Games official calls for better understanding

A top Olympic committee official yesterday called for better understanding of people with physical disabilities on the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Paralympics.

"We need to have more modern ideas about disabled people and their participation in the Olympics," Tang Xiaoquan, executive vice-president of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG), said.

She said that such things as traffic laws were made because people get injured in road accidents, and that part of the reason medical science develops is to help people who are born with disabilities.