South Korea’s prime minister on Thursday rejected an offer to cohost the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics with other countries as he urged officials to speed up the construction work for the sports event.

South Korea began building six new stadiums for events, including alpine ski, figure and short-track skating, earlier this year and the work is well on its way, the prime minister’s office said. “It is difficult to apply the cohosting proposal, especially given the time left as well as the progress made in the construction work,” Prime Minister Chung Hong-won said in a meeting on the event.

South Korea has said it plans to spend nearly 700 billion won ($635 million) for the construction of six new stadiums and renovation of existing stadiums for the Olympics.

Chung’s comments represent the clearest rejection to the International Olympics Committee’s controversial suggestion for sharing the event with other host cities.

Earlier this month, the IOC approved a set of recommendations for its Olympic 2020 Agenda, which included a cost-saving option for an Olympic host city to cohost the games with foreign cities. The move raised the possibility of cohosting the PyeongChang Olympics with the Japanese city of Nagano, the host of the 1998 Winter Olympics, with the PyeongChang organizer continuing to reject the idea.

Cohosting Olympics is not unprecedented between South Korea and Japan. The two neighbors cohosted the World Cup in 2002 when South Korea advanced to the semifinals.

In Thursday’s meeting, officials also approved an 85.9 billion won plan to build an event hall for the 2018 Olympics’ opening and closing ceremonies as well as highway and railway renovation plans, according to the prime minister’s office.

The construction work for the 40,000-seat ceremony hall will kick off in January next year in the alpine city of Pyeongchang, it said.

The highway and railway renovation work are, meanwhile, designed to help better transport athletes and Olympic spectators to the city located close to the country’s east coast.

The railway renovation is expected to shorten the current travel time of 118 minutes to 98 minutes in the route linking the Incheon International Airport near to the city, it also noted. (Yonhap)