Organisers scramble as weather disrupts penultimate day of Beiing Winter Olympics

YANQING, China: Organisers scrambled to reorganise the Alpine mixed team parallel race for the final day of the Beijing Olympics after high winds on Saturday (Feb 19) forced the competition to be postponed.

Team officials and organisers agreed to hold the event, which is only its second edition, on Sunday at 9am despite several teams being scheduled to fly home.

The decision is likely to mean some teams have to rearrange their flights and accommodation bookings but it was not immediately clear if all would remain to compete.

Alpine team officials will hold their usual pre-race "captains' meeting" at 5pm when the start list will be agreed upon, and only then will it be clear how many of the 15 teams will remain in the rescheduled event.

Olympics and International Ski Federation (FIS) officials were keen to avoid the complications that would come with the rare case of an event not being held.

Juan Antonio Samaranch, the head of the International Olympic Committee's coordination commission for Beijing, told the IOC session that these issues were to be expected at a Winter Games.

"We had weather issues but this is Winter Games. We are coping with the difficulties still left but this is winter and we are here to celebrate exactly that - winter," he said.

The closing ceremony for the Beijing Games is on Sunday at 8 pm. The weather forecast for Sunday is for slightly better wind conditions earlier in the day.

On Saturday at 9 am, gusts were recorded as between 24 and 28 metres per second. On Sunday gusts are forecast between 19-22 m/s at that time.

The weather also disrupted competition at the National Cross-Country Centre in Zhangjiakou.

The men's 50km cross-country mass start, one of the sport's blue riband events, was postponed by an