The closing ceremonies. Photo: Vincent Laforet for NEWSWEEK

1) Eight for Eight: Nobody doubted that Michael Phelps could win each of the eight races—five individual and three relays—he entered. But could he win all of them in the Olympic hothouse, a feat that required him to swim 17 times over nine long days? Turns out he could—seven of them in world record times. But he needed a miracle relay leg by a teammate in one race and had to survive a photo finish (and Serbian protest) in another. The biggest record—eight gold medals in a single Olympics—should stand forever. Phelps’ total of 14 Olympic gold medals is the most by any athlete in history.

Photo: Mike Powell for NEWSWEEK

3) China’s Gold Rush: It didn’t exactly come as a surprise. China almost caught the United States in gold medals in Athens and had pointed to Beijing as the Games in which they would assert their athletic supremacy. The results of world championships during the years from Athens to Beijing gave fair warning. Still, nobody was quite prepared for the landslide win, as China netted 51 gold medals to America’s 36. The U.S. still topped the charts in total medals (110-100), but with China’s population, the state sports system and unstinting investment, that seems unlikely to hold at the 2012 London Games. What keeps China-U.S. from becoming a great rivalry is that China excels at sports—table tennis, weightlifting, shooting, diving—in which American isn’t very competitive and which evoke little interest in our country. In the one sports, woman’s gymnastics, we do care about, there was plenty of consternation about the result, complaints about favorable “home” judging and allegations that the Chinese cheated with underage gymnasts.

4)Tragedy/Triumph: The tragedy at a popular Beijing tourist attraction was almost unimaginable—an attack by a knife-wielding Chinese man on the in-laws of U.S. men’s volleyball coach Hugh McCutcheon. His father-in-law Todd Bachman was killed and Bachman’s wife, Barbara, seriously injured. The killer committed suicide so it is unlikely there will ever be an explanation for the bizarre crime in a city considered highly safe for tourists. Win it for the coach never had to be said out loud. But while McCutcheon was away from the Olympics with his family (he resumed coaching duties after four games), a U.S. volleyball team that hadn’t won a medal since a bronze in Barcelona back in 1992 caught fire. It went undefeated throughout the tournament, climaxing with a comeback win over defending Olympic champion Brazil. When McCutcheon called his wife back home in the States wand heard her, she exclaimed, “You won, you won!” Then he told reporters, “There was nothing left to say. We were just kind of listening to each other smile into the phone.” We smiled too. Maybe even cried a little.

5) Ballet on Bars and Beams: For a reporter a few stories become more personal. Years ago I became captivated by a 14-year-old gymnast who performed with a lyrical beauty that I had never seen from an American.. For NEWSWEEK’s annual, year-end “Who’s Next” issue, I am responsible for picking one young athlete who will make a splash. In 2006 I picked Liukin. But she was beset by a series of nagging injuries, and an Iowa sparkplug, Shawn Johnson, became America’s new gymnastics darling and the Beijing favorite. The American duo went 1-2 in the all-around in Beijing, but it was Liukin’s balletic performance that landed her on top. Johnson, with three silver medals already in hand, finally won a very happy gold on balance beam. But it was Liukin who went home to Texas with the biggest prize (as well as five Olympic medals).

6) The ‘We’ In American Teams: There has been a sneaking suspicion that American athletes had lost their grasp on the team thing. In recent years, our all-star teams have been humbled by international losses in sports that we dominate: basketball, golf and baseball. But in Beijing, most American teams excelled. Both men’s and women’s basketball, volleyball and water polo teams made it to the gold-medal games, as did the U.S. women’s softball and soccer teams. The U.S. went 4-4 in those finals, but this mother lode of team golds and silvers demonstrated that when they put their minds to it, Americans still know how to play well together.

7) The ‘Redeem Team’: The U.S. men’s basketball team had a lot to make up for--two miserable performances in the last two world championships and a dismal bronze at the Athens Olympics. But Kobe and company proved up to the task, thoroughly dominating the competition until the finals where they met defending world champion Spain. In a game far closer than the final scored indicated, the NBA stars responded to every Spanish challenge—and used their speed advantage and some clutch outside shooting to squeeze out a 118-107 win. They celebrated the gold medal with all the excitement of high-school kids who had won the state championship. Beyond the court, the NBA stars treated the competition with the respect the rest of the world gives it—and were goodwill ambassadors all over the Olympics, cheering on Americans from the women’s basketball team (undefeated gold medalists also) to Michael Phelps.

8) Going Solo: Even with the basketball team’s Olympic revival, there was no better tale of redemption than that of Hope Solo. Solo was the starting goalkeeper for an unbeaten U.S. women’s soccer team in last year’s World Cup when the American coach inexplicably benched her for the semi-final against Brazil. After Brazil thrashed the Yanks, Solo went off on him and, far worse, suggested she would have performed better than her replacement. It was an unconscionable moment by the sisterhood standards of American soccer and Solo was kicked off the team and sent home. But the new coach convinced reluctant team members—“Do you want to win? she asked them—to let Solo return for the Olympic run. Against, of course, Brazil in the finals, Solo was the standout star, shutting out a superior attack until the Americans muster a goal overtime. A jubilant Solo explained afterward that she had broken a new barrier in women’s sports: “we don’t all have to be friends.”

Photo: Donald Miralle for NEWSWEEK

9) China Beach: Just as it has been since beach volleyball was introduced to the Olympics, the rhythm of the beach was decidedly American—from the rock and roll to the Chinese cheerleaders in tiny bikinis. The results went America’s way too. Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh won gold in the pouring rain and extended their astounding unbeaten streak to more than a year. The next day, the sun was shining on Phil Dalhauser and Todd Rogers, who completed the American sweep.

10) Butterfingers: There was, of course, one mortifying exception to all that good American team play: track’s 4X100 relay teams. The U.S. era of sprint dominance is clearly over and the Americans would have been underdogs to Jamaica in the relays anyway. Still, you don’t have a chance if you don’t get the baton around the track. And in the first preliminary heat, both the U.S. teams dropped it before the final leg. It is the third straight Olympics in which the American women have bungled the handling of the baton. If USA basketball can command Kobe Bryant and LeBron James to training camps, then USA Track and Field can force its sprinters to convene and practice their relay skills before each Olympics. It’s either that or more embarrassments on track’s biggest stage.

Photo: Donald Miralle for NEWSWEEK

Some people predicted the 2008 Olympic spectacle would be worthy of Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favorite filmmaker whose theme for the 1936 Games was "Triumph of the Will". Instead, for the dazzling closing ceremony which brought the Olympics to a close tonight, we got Busby Berkeley reincarnated as an engineer. How else could you think up 60 furiously pedalling cyclists in glowing tracksuits propelling giant "light wheels" precisely 2.008 meters in diameter, symbolizing "the collision of time and space and the human spirit of constantly surpassing oneself and never giving up".

Or a massive 23-meter "Memory Tower" -- think Tower of Babel built with an erector set -- rising out of a pit in the ground, suddenly swarmed by 396 nimble climbers (in mountaineering kit) clad in tracksuits that are red on the underbelly and silver on the back, enabling the  men to create visual images, like the "sacred flame" and the "running man" symbol of the Beijing Games, by gyrating as they clung to the girders or scuttled scarab-like over the structure and abseiled down its sides?

Leading up to the Games, Beijing's tsars of sport took pains to lowball medals projections in the conservative fashion of its economic planners. In the end the Chinese squad far outstripped its softly stated goal of 40 golds. With 51, China is the first nation to crack the 50 mark since the USSR won 55 in 1988. It's a phenomenal achievement, but what to make of it? The host nation's sweet showing was undercut by bitter controversy over its female gymnasts' ages, the numbing disappointment of its sole track star Liu Xiang, and the perennial critique that Team China is just the latest gargantuan image project - if the Party builds it, the medals will come.

It therefore seemed fitting that China's last couple golds came in the embattled event of boxing. I spent much of the weekend in the circular gallery of the Workers Gymnasium, a musty gem of Soviet-inspired monumentalism. There I saw China's fighters scrap their way on up from a single bronze at Athens to one bronze, one silver and two gold medals in Beijing. One of those two golds, the country's first, was won by the reigning world champ without much of a fight. The other came courtesy of a dark horse with a motivational tattoo of a winged Pegasus on his left arm, not to mention a major boost from the crowd and the benefit of the doubt from the judges. If you think the regurgitated debate over medals rankings is going to be a tough one to ever resolve - given America's historic focus on cumulative medals versus China’s (and many other nations') on gold - try judging the victor of an Olympic boxing bout.

In the light heavyweight final, Zhang Xiaoping outmaneuvered Ireland's Kenny Egan by a tally of 11-7. It was Zhang's second straight upset, and if conventional wisdom in our press section was any indication, the scoring was dubious

Watching Nigeria play Argentina in the men’s soccer final this afternoon at the Bird’s Nest reminded me of a grievous oversight. Sitting in the stands, I was so appalled by the U.S. team's early departure from the tournament last week—2-1 at the feet of Nigeria—that I forgot to vent publicly.

The American team is good enough to compete with most anybody in the youth ranks—the Olympics is a under-23 affair (with three ringers). But it’s not nearly good enough that it can afford the kind of stupidity that in Beijing assured it wouldn’t survive the qualifying round.

Coachs’ sons are expected to be savvier than the average player. But the first dim-witted play came in the game before Nigeria against the Netherlands. In the waning moments, Michael Bradley, son of the coach of the U.S. senior men’s team, took an unnecessary and, even worse, futile, yellow card for delay of game. Granted it might not have mattered had the U.S. hung on to its lead, punching its ticket to the quarterfinals. But the Dutch scored in the final seconds and Bradley, thanks to his second yellow in two games, had to sit out the critical showdown with Nigeria. The 21-year-old is a key cog in the midfield, good enough that a week later he was in the starting lineup for his dad when the U.S. opened World Cup qualifying in Guatamala.

Still, Bradley’s stalling ploy classifies as genius next to the bone-headed retaliatory elbow that got defender Michael Orozco ejected just three minutes into the Nigeria game. The Americans, needing only a tie to advance, were game, but outmanned. And when a late rally fell short—a header clanged off the post—they were headed home.

Orozco compounded his sin afterwards by refusing to express a modicum of regret for his costly foul. But far worse was how coach Peter Nowak praised his team’s efforts in Beijing, acting as if U.S. soccer was still an interloper in the world’s game and couldn’t reasonably be expected to produce anything more than a first-round ouster. Nowak must have been sleeping through his team's brilliant performance against the European U-23 champ Netherlands, when his team looked the equal of any.

Fans of American soccer are used to folks around the world denigrating our game. But it's particularly galling when it comes from our own coach, who should know better. There is no longer any reason to have such meager expectations for a country that, despite its minimal traditions, has usurped Mexico as the leading soccer power in its region. The American game may not yet be at the level where we can expect the team to get out of the qualifying rounds, but it certainly is at the level where we can be disappointed when it doesn’t. While there may still be Pyrrhic victories to come for American soccer, losing in a preliminary round will never again produce one of them.

As for the Nigerian team that the U.S. barely lost to, it proceeded to beat Ivory Coast 2-0 in the quarters and to thrash Belgium 4-1 in the semis before it lost 1-0 to the defending Olympic champion Argentina. Who knows what the United States might have done if it had played with as much brains as it did heart?

The end of the U.S.-Nigeria soccer match. Photo by Mike Powell for NEWSWEEK

Ever heard of wushu? Most if not all of China's 1.3 billion people have. But contributor Fergus Naughton explains why you might not have. And why China's traditional martial arts are not competing with beach volleyball to snag Olympic spectators during the 2008 Games: 

     In 2001 when Beijing got the nod from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to host the 2008 Games, it was hoped by many that wushu -- China's traditional practice of martial arts, also referred to as gong fu or kung fu --  would be accepted as a medal event seven years later. After all, South Korea got to introduce its indigenous martial art of taekwondo as an exhibition event in the Seoul '88 games. Surely wushu -- the ultimate synthesis of China's unique sporting tradition, martial ability, philosophy, religion, poetry, calligraphy, music, painting, drama and literature (to name but a few of the inputs) -- would be considered worthy as an exhibition event?

    It was not to be. IOC head Jacques Rogge declared in 2005 that wushu would not be added as an Olympic event. "We are not introducing wushu in the Olympic program," state media reported Rogge as then saying. "It will not be an exhibition, not at all," he said. This was an unimaginable kick in the face

Good thing the IOC killed Beijing’s idea, back in 2000, of Beach Volleyball on Tiananmen Square. It would never have been such a blast. Who could fathom the centerpiece of the 1989 carnage sandboxed for a fortnight a la playa? Who spiked Beijing boss Liu Qi’s tea before he had that idea, for that matter? As twisted and tactless as Liu's proposed site in the Square came off globally when the story first broke, it would not have played any better domestically today (even as memories of the 1989 crackdown fade from many Chinese minds, or never entered them in the first place.)  That's because the whole uptightness of the place could never have hosted flouncing beach gals in string bikinis, patriotic odes remixed to techno, and the favored Americans emerging triumphant in a sweep of gold: dude, not in the square. Chairman Mao would have been bummed.

      In the end Games organizers picked a  substitute locale, deep inside Chaoyang Park. It’s the capital’s biggest, least historic and most artificial park, known almost solely for the bawdy nightlife around it. And so it became an natural destination for the varied elements of beach volleyball: white sand brought in from Hainan island, blaring dance mash-ups spun by DJ Stari (an Athens vet from Austria), and the frat-boyish emcee “Geeter”, of the U.S. pro tour, firing up the crowd.

    At each break in the action, on came the aforementioned beach girls, the most shapely of all

Power and Grace: Misti May-Treanor of the U.S. in the 2008 Olympics gold medal match. Photo by Vincent Laforet for NEWSWEEK

By Ashley Harris

In the summer of  1996  I was formally introduced to spandex. Not long after my cousin, former U.S. National Volleyball Team member Penny Lucas-White, accepted the head women’s volleyball coaching position at the United States Air Force Academy; I spent the first of what would become many summers in Colorado Springs training with the some of the top players in the country. When I arrived for the first day of camp I was surrounded by young ladies my age who had at least two years playing experience on me. These girls wore their unadorned hair in high ponytails or buns. The sleeves of their t-shirts tucked lazily into the straps of their sports bras to keep arms bare, and yes, they had spandex on. Clearly, I missed the memo that an integral part of this sport is not only comfort, but also image, which are not mutually exclusive entities.

This is especially true in the beach variety of the game. Since the introduction of beach volleyball at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the two most frequently asked questions have all been variations on this theme: “Isn’t this terrible that the players are half-naked?” and “Isn’t this awesome that the players are half naked?” As a player I learned that the answers to both questions basically came down to this: Yes, there are a lot of practical and competitive reasons we wear these uniforms. And, no, sexualization of the sport isn’t one of them.

Sure, there are legion beach and indoor volleyball fans that tune in to watch hot girls in bikinis, and, you know, if there’s a game involved, so much the better. At least in the minds of some 15-year-old--or 60-year-old--males, watching taut, half-naked bodies drip in sweat as they dive into the sand is some version of nirvana, but there are actual reasons for the skimpy uniforms. First is comfort: the reduced amount of clothing helps cool body temperature in matches that are often played under a grueling mid-day sun. Some critics have argued that more dermis level injuries came from the lack of clothing. Possibly, but the majority of my injuries came from areas not normally covered by clothing anyway. I have left plenty skin on the court, but it came from my elbows, shins and wrists.

The uniforms are practical and more comfortable than wearing loose fitting clothing. Those first weeks of camp, while I was wearing my old baggy basketball shorts and t-shirts, I noticed the girls moved more efficiently on the court than I did. They seemed to jump higher and land faster. Not only did they seem lighter in the air, they were diving and getting up quicker - not drowning in mesh shorts that seemed to always get in my way. They were able to roll over their shoulder and see the net, not the hem of their shorts. Suddenly, my shorts felt like a parachute, impeding my blocking and hitting. Many of the players I admired, like the current U.S. women’s indoor captain Danielle Scott-Aruda, wore the smaller uniform and was able to command the court without looking self-conscious.

In fact, as I learned, it was just he opposite. There is nothing more intimidating than watching a group of twelve six-foot tall women slam a ball down at speeds of 90 mph and seeing nothing jiggle, wiggle or move on their bodies. Watch The University of Nebraska Lady Cornhuskers play one day. Watch May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh. Watch the current Olympic team. They take their opponents out of the game before they step foot on the court by physical appearance alone. More than anything, they carried themselves like volleyball players. All sports have it, that certain swag that says “hey, I’m an athlete and I’ll kick your ass on the court/field/track/pool.” A 27-inch vertical didn’t matter to me anymore; I wanted to look like them.

I bought an acceptable pair of spandex shorts and a control top bikini to play in. At first, it was a bit of an unnerving, self-conscious experience. But soon noticed an improvement. I slid across the ground without worrying my shorts were going to fall off and expose my undies. I could get in the “ready” position--full squat, one foot slightly forward, and on the balls of my feet--prepared to pass the ball without having to constantly adjust my shorts before the whistle blew. The same applied with beach volleyball. Shorts and shirts were for amateurs. The effect was the same, I wasn’t stuck in my clothing after diving in the sand, I wasn’t fooling around with the waistband of my shorts and I wasn’t overheating under the blazing Colorado sun. Plus, I looked like I was about to hurt someone’s feelings on the court. As the years went on and I became a serious player, the shorts got shorter and the uniforms got tighter. It was great not to get stuck in my shirt or my teammates shirt when coming down from blocking the ball in tandem.

So to the naysayers I say, get over it. Consider that beach volleyball athletes have the option to wear one-piece bathing suits, but the majority choose not to. There’s function to the form, and as these gold medals keep rolling in from our nation’s top volleyball competitors people will soon remember that this is sport, not mud-wrestling.

 Duncan Hewitt in Shanghai reports on a new trend in Chinese media, which has begun revealing personal stories and quirks of Olympic athletes:

We all know Chinese authorities are just a tiny bit concerned about how their country is perceived, both by foreigners and their own citizens, as a result of these Olympics. “We are an image-conscious nation – we do house-cleaning when guests visit,” announced the official China Daily in an angry editorial denouncing foreign criticism of the Games last week.  This ‘image-consciousness’ has been a sub-theme of everything from ultra-tight security to the politburo-level intervention in the choice of the little girl who sang at the opening ceremony.  And state media are of course doing their bit to present a picture of a harmonious, confident, and increasingly important nation: “Beijing brings happiness to the world,” and “Beijing has made the Olympics more genuinely global in nature” are just two of the front page headlines run by the always on-message tabloid The Global Times over the past fortnight.

For journalists, the Olympics is a marathon, not a sprint. But today is my sprint version, touching briefly on 10 items of Beijing business that are on my mind.

1) What an embarrassment that the IOC president Jacques Rogge bashed Jamaican superstar sprinter Usain Bolt for over-celebrating. Bolt has been one of the most appealing and engaging athletes of the Games and nobody I talked to thought his style reflected any disrespect for his rivals. Why doesn’t the IOC pick on somebody its own size? Like China maybe. It couldn’t work up the same righteous indignation when the Chinese reneged on key agreements like dispersal of information. And now they have reluctantly taken up the matter of China’s transparently underage gymnasts, flagrant cheating that is the moral and practical equivalent of doping.

2) The Beijing Games may be the best competitive Olympics I have seen in my long tenure. And credit the Chinese with brilliant organization and execution. But the obsession with security and keeping the buses running on time has kept us in a cocoon. There are no casual intersections between reporters and real people from Beijing—unless you leave the sports arena and venture into the city. But when most of us venture out, it’s to the not-so-real city, the tourist places like the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. I loved how at the Sydney Olympics total strangers would beckon and say, “Buy you a beer, mate.” Here the Chinese who approach want only to take our picture—not even with them, but alone. We are simply curiosities

3) When I was a younger man, the winner of the medal count was the country that won the most medals. Somewhere along the way that switched and gold took on a primacy. Now the country that tops the charts is the one that wins the most gold. That will be China for the first time (and presumably forever now), though they probably won’t catch the United States in total medals. But the U.S. Olympic Committee today suggested a new, improved method of counting that would boost America’s standing: the total number of athletes who leave Beijing with gold medals around their necks. That new view is a reflection of the renewed strength of the United States in virtually all the team competitions.

4) The American softball team exited Beijing and the Olympics on a teary note. But the upset loss to Japan may come back to help them when the IOC considers reinstating softball for the 2016 Games. One of the complaints that led to softball getting booted from the Olympics in the first place was America’s dominance of the sport. With Tokyo and Chicago two of the four contenders to host the 2016 Olympics, that American loss could pay dividends when the IOC votes on softball’s future in the fall of 2009.

5) You couldn’t help but sympathize with the Brazilian women’s soccer coach, whose team had outplayed the Americans for the second straight Olympics and lost the gold medal in overtime for a second straight time. Brazil could have used a victory to bolster the support for the women’s game at home and perhaps throughout Latin American, where it is given short shrift. Still, he had nothing to be embarrassed about when it came to his team’s performance. The same can’t be said about Dunga, the Brazilian men’s coach. Brazil has not only abandoned its “beautiful game”, but it has adopted an ugly one, embracing the thuggish tactics of underskilled squads. Pele and others must be weeping as they watch.

6) The most frequent question we reporters are asked in correspondence from home is: What do you think of the NBC coverage? We see none of the NBC coverage so we have no opinions. If we see the Olympics on TV, it is on a private Olympic broadcast or on CCTV, Chinese television. CCTV has revealed to me the universality of sports broadcasting. Having watched so much sports on TV, I feel like I know what the Chinese commentators are saying based on the pitch of their voices.

7) The most pleasant surprise for the American team at these games is the indoor volleyball revival, with both the U.S. men and women reaching the gold-medal game. The biggest disappointment, without a doubt, is the track and field team. None of the biggest names on the team—Tyson Gay, Allyson Felix, Jeremy Wariner, Bernard Lagat, the shotput trio, Lolo Jones—took gold. And the performance in the 4X100 relay—dropped batons by both the men and the women was an embarrassment. It’s getting to be a bad habit. If U.S.A. basketball can command Kobe and LeBron to make a three-year commitment, can’t U.S.A. Track & Field stage a mandatory relay camp for its sprinters? The only consolation was that both teams spared themselves a whipping by Jamaica. As one press wag handicapped the men’s race, “For the U.S. to beat Jamaica, they would not only have to drop the baton, but lose it completely.” (Update: The Jamaican relay teams one-upped the Americans in every way. The women dropped the baton and, in their desperation, managed to collide with the British runners and knock them out of the race too; the men, however, held on and set a world record--a third world record for Bolt in one week!)

8) It’s been years now since Hollywood told us what all sports fans already knew: “White Men Can’t Jump.” But America’s black jumpers have come up short and low at this Olympics too. It would be bad enough that no American won a medal in the long jump, the high jump and the triple jump, events at which the country has long excelled. But no American even reached the finals. Are all our leapers going for the bigger money in basketball?

9) What the United States needs to catch the Chinese at future Olympics is more new “X” sports that were invented in America. Today was the debut of BMX and, while the American riders did not win a gold, they took three of the six medals. Can't do that in the longstanding Olympic cycling competitions. Where would the American medal count be, winter or summer, without the steady addition of non-traditional Olympics sports like half-pipe, short-track speedskating, snowboard cross and beach volleyball?

10) Sorry, boss. I have no idea who Michael Phelps may have been necking with at some party and—I know this comes as a shock—I couldn’t care less.

In her Asia Rising column, Melinda Liu writes on the debate in China about the country's obsession with bringing home the most Olympic gold medals:

China's shock—some called it "mourning"—over champion hurdler Liu Xiang's withdrawal due to injury Monday from the Olympics is bigger than a single athlete, albeit a very charismatic one. His dramatic pullout has roiled discussion on a number of delicate subjects, from government transparency (or lack thereof) to flaws in the Soviet-style sports system to sponsors' pressures on athletes—and most importantly to China's obsession with a home-team Olympic "Gold Rush." Officials and citizens alike had made little attempt to conceal their goal of winning the most gold medals at these Games, supplanting the American sports superpower as No. 1, at least in golds. Liu's anticipated gold had been seen as special; it symbolized the rare example of an Asian's ability to dominate a track and field event.

But instead of grabbing gold, Liu hobbled off the track. Now the current period of soul-searching "is a good opportunity to debate this 'Gold Rush'," says Dong Jun, an announcer from the Beijing Games organizing committee. He believes it's time to re-examine the centralized and elitist "going for gold" approach. At the other end of the spectrum is what Chinese call the "sports for all" attitude that would treat athletes less like robots and more like, well, people who play sports because it's fun.

READ THE FULL COLUMN HERE

An 'I' in Team: The U.S. women celebrate. Photo by Donald Miralle for NEWSWEEK

That notion was supposed to be at the core of the next generation of U.S. women's team players. But the 2007 World Cup in China revealed that it had never completely taken hold. The implosion came after starting goalkeeper Hope Solo, who had backstopped the team without a loss to the semi-finals, was benched against Brazil in favor of the veteran, Briana Scurry. Scurry was hardly the only problem that day when a quicker, more talented Brazilian team kicked the U.S. women 4-0. But afterward, Solo mouthed off, indicating not only her displeasure at being sidelined, but insisting that she would have fared better than Scurry, a hero of the ’99 World Cup triumph.

Trashing a teammate and a coach was something a man would do and the team reacted with predictable fury. No longer was Solo just benched, she was booted off the team and on her way home before the U.S. team, with Scurry in goal, won the bronze medal game. The loss and the subsequent mess cost coach Greg Ryan his job. His replacement, Pia Sundhage, a Swede and the first non-American to coach the U.S. women’s national team, faced a lot of resistance when she invited Solo back. But she insisted that Solo was critical to the team's Olympic hopes. “Do you want to win?” she asked the players.

And last night with Solo in the nets, the United States—in the kind of delicious irony that sport so often serves up—faced heavily favored Brazil again, this time for the Olympic gold medal. Could the woman who had so recklessly shed one legacy be the mainstay in rescuing another—winning?

For 90 minutes, the 27-year-old Solo did everything possible to keep the United States in the gold-medal chase. She gobbled up balls without a stumble or a fumble, executed perfectly timed dashes to beat the speedy Brazilian forwards to the ball and punched out several dangerous corner kicks that she couldn’t snare. And in the 72^nd minute when the brilliant Marta dribbled through two U.S. defenders and fired inside post, Solo knocked away what looked to be a sure goal with her right forearm as she was falling to her left. The Brazilian coach would say later he was already getting to his feet to celebrate.

In the 89^th minute, U.S. forward Amy Rodriguez had the fairytale ending on her foot. After a game in which Brazil had frequently looked dangerous—it had 14 corner kicks to the U.S.’s  3 and possessed the ball 58 percent of the game—and the U.S. hadn’t, Rodriguez slipped through the Brazilian defense and went in alone on the goalkeeper. But rather than try to go around the keeper, who had ventured out, she tried to loft the ball softly over her and didn’t get it above her fingertips.

Sometimes you just have to work overtime for redemption. While Solo remained unflappable, keeping the potent Brazilian attack at bay, the ball finally took a big bounce America’s way in the sixth minute of the 30-minute overtime session, This time when Rodriguez got the ball at the top of the box, she knew exactly what to do with it. She slid it over to midfielder Carli Lloyd, the team’s best outside gun and the one player who had been outspoken in defense of Solo. Lloyd fired a left-footer, diagonally from about 19 yards out, and the ball just slid past the outstretched left hand of the sprawling Brazilian keeper.

The Brazilians never stopped threatening and fired away on Solo throughout the second half of overtime. But their shots were always just wide or just over the net. On one free kick from 30 yards out, Solo appeared to be screened because she never moved on the ball, but it skittered wide right. In the final minute, Brazil had two more golden opportunities; Solo punched one out of danger and sprawled to deflect the second wide. When the final whistle blew and the U.S. had held on for a 1-0 victory, Solo raised her arms in triumph and charged upfield and into the middle of her jubilant teammates.

Welcome: Solo after the match. Photo by Donald Miralle for Newsweek

But soon she was alone at the end of the field, talking on a cellphone to her brother back home in Washington. Later when she was asked if she felt fully part of the team now, she suggested that maybe she had been a pioneer—like Hamm, though she never suggested that—in changing roles in women’s sports. “We don’t have to be best friends,” she said of her and her teammates. But she clearly felt some burden had been lifted. “I can be myself now without looking over my shoulder,” she said. “I’m free to be myself now.” Asked if she felt vindicated, she simply said, “I feel amazing.”

Nobody will ever know if Solo would have made a difference against Brazil in the World Cup a year ago. And maybe her decidedly unsisterly comments were bad form. But in old-fashioned parlance, if she talked the talk back then, tonight she certainly walked the walk. Solo was all the difference. And thanks above all to her heroic efforts, the United States women’s soccer team has added another gold medal—probably the most surprising in its storied history--to its vast treasure trove.

It’s hard to explain to friends back home, deeply envious of my privilege to go to any Olympic event I choose, why sometimes I prefer to watch the events in my office on the closed-circuit Olympic broadcast rather than watch them from prime press seats in the stands. The answer in a word: rain!

When my pal Filip woke me early this morning to tell me not to worry, that he had already confirmed that the beach volleyball final would be played regardless, I sensed that I wasn’t hearing entirely good news. I pulled back the shades in my room, glanced out the window and made the kind of spur-of-the-moment decision the truly great journalist must always be prepared for. Misty and Kerri had no choice but to play in a downpour—“that’s another reason we wear bathing suits,” Misty May-Treanor told reporters—but I could opt to stay dry back at the Main Press Center.

Apart from the comfort of dry clothes, there are certain professional advantages to staying away as well. Even with a bus system that, in my long Olympic tenure, deserves the gold medal for both efficiency and courtesy, the rigors of traveling to and fro pretty much limit you two events a day. But sit in front of the tube, with its 39 Olympic channels and a grandmaster like Al on the clicker, and you can see virtually every play of every game of every sport. At one point, Al was going back and forth so fast that I thought our heavyweight wrestler had just spiked a winner on the beach through the Chinese pair.

The biggest bonus today was that a time when I would have been riding the bus back from the “beach”, I got to see the a real volleyball game instead. Now I am not so old that the appeal of beach volleyball is lost on me. With all due respect to our women's gold-medal duo, May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh, who are not only sensational athletes but among my all-time, favorite Olympians, beach volleyball would not rate NBC prime-time live if not for the dimensions of the uniform and the hardbodies that are uncovered by them. (That is equally true for the men’s game.) And while the downpour might render me a sodden mess, it certainly had the players’ bodies glistening—sweat to the nth degree. (I am told that the Chinese were at first appalled by such immodesty among its athletes, but, with two duos in the women’s final four, they have obvious adjusted to our dubious Western ways.)

I know it is heresy to say this, but absent the titillation (and the rock and roll that punctuates the game), the beach version is simply not as interesting a game as traditional indoor volleyball. The six-on-a-side game has longer, more spectacular rallies and more variety in both play and strategy. Frankly, I had kind of forgotten how compelling the old-fashioned volleyball can be. I suspect that’s because we journalists are parochial and U.S. teams haven’t been serious medal contenders since both the men and women took bronze in Barcelona back in 1992.

But in Beijing we have witnessed an American revival. The men’s team is undefeated and will play Russia in the semis tomorrow. And today the American women played almost the perfect game to reach the finals, sweeping a Cuban team that had shut them out three sets to none just 10 days ago. These women sweat too, but it is not a sideshow; the rivulets simply disappear into their uniforms rather than their bellybuttons. They also leap, dive and sprawl with precious little regard for their bodies, the floor being a bit less forgiving than the sand.

Chacun a son gout, but I’m going against the flow and casting my lot with our indoor volleyballers. Frankly, it was such a pleasure watching the American women’s combination of power and precision, grit and finesse that it was like a day at the beach.

 Contributor Jennifer Conrad continues her tour of National Houses in Beijing:

      A friend with IOC connections put me on the guest list for the London House, but when I arrived the person manning the door said he didn't have the list, and I needed to call someone inside to bring me to the check-in desk. My friends were on their way in a taxi, so I waited outside. Then we had to find someone to let us in, in order to be checked off the guest list. (How did the first party guest get in? I don't know!) This process continued throughout the night as other friends arrived; someone joked that the security was tighter than at the Olympic venues. But after flashing our passports, going through a metal detector, getting wanded, and having our bags x-rayed, we found a beautiful outdoor space with an open bar, barbecue, and Chinese dishes.

     I asked someone how this was supposed to promote the London Olympics, if no one was allowed in. He responded that the event was really for networking and feeling important. No wonder the scene was so sedate. At 12:30, the lights were abruptly turned on full blast, then turned off again, leaving everyone in total darkness. Apparently, it was the organizers way of saying it was time to go.

...London House, before the lights went out

We all knew China's population was graying rapidly, but Wednesday authorities drove home the point by sentencing two elderly women to the gulag. Wu Dianyuan and Wang Xiuying are both citizens in their late 70's who walk using canes; Wang is partially blind.  They'd applied for permission to protest in one of the three government-designated "protest corners" in  Beijing public parks. Their grievance is a common one: that they received inadequate compensation for their homes which were demolished in a recent pre-Games wave of urban redevelopment. Permission to protest was not granted; none of at least 77 applicants have received permission, in fact. Then the two elderly ladies each received a suspended sentence of one year of "re-education through labor", an extra-judicial punishment that doesn't require the decision of a court judge.

On the Run: Bolt wins the 200 meters. Photo by Donald Miralle for NEWSWEEK

When Johnson set his record at the '96 Atlanta Olympics, he staggered in disbelief after the finish line when he saw his own time of 19.32. Almost immediately the stadium loud speakers blasted a pop song with the refrain "Unbelievable." And there was really no other word for it. Johnson had shattered one of the longest surviving records in his sport--and by a margin of more than a half second.

Bolt only shaved .02 seconds off Johnson's mark, but "unbelievable" seemed the right word choice once again. When Michael Phelps closed out his Olympics with a record eight gold medals, it was hard to imagine any other Olympic athlete giving a performance to rival his. Phelps remains the standout of these Games, but Bolt is giving him a run for his money--at the very least a #2 with a bullet on the Olympic charts.

The Jamaican flash, who is essentially a rookie at the elite levels of sprinting--he turned 22 years old a few hours after his gold-medal race--had already broken the world record in the 100 meters last Saturday. The Olympics, with multiple heats in both the 100 and 200, is supposed to be a challenging place in which to set a world record let alone two. In his winning 200, he ran .35 seconds faster than his own personal best and more than a half second faster than the second-place finisher, Churandy Martina of Netherlands Antilles. America's Wallace Spearmon finished third. Later, both would be disqualified for running out of their lanes, and Americans Shawn Crawford and Walter Dix were awarded the silver and bronze medals.

But numbers don't quite tell the story of Bolt's magical runs here. Just like in the 100, there was remarkably little appearance of effort in his race. Bolt appears to glide over the track, as sweet a stride as the sport may have ever witnessed. If he ever decides that the 400 meters is a good race for him, Johnson's last world record would almost certainly fall quickly.

Then again neither the records nor his running style quite explain why he has emerged here as such a monumental star. Bolt has a playful quality--he danced and mugged and "I'm numbered oned" during his victory lap--and celebrated his latest victory with such infectious joy that not only the Chinese, but fans from every nation seemed to embrace him like a fellow countryman. The two universal rhythms of Jamaica: reggae and now Bolt.

At a press conference in Beijing before the Games, Bolt said he didn't know if he would run both races. When reporters informed him that his coach had already said he would, Bolt wasn't the least non-plussed. Apparently he likes surprises. So do sportswriters and Bolt delivered a beauty tonight. ("No way, no how," was my prescient pronouncement before the race on his prospects for another record.)

In a sport plagued by doping scandals, Bolt appears a breath of fresh air. But after his stunning performance every true fan, burned so many times by champions who turned out to be cheats, offered the same silent prayer: "Oh God, I hope he's clean."

After the bronze-medal disaster of the U.S. men's basketball team in Athens four years ago, there was a consensus that the American men seem to lack some fundamental understanding of the concept of T-E-A-M. If you wanted to see American squads with real team values, you went and watched our women play sports. While Kobe and company have done much to rehabilitate our nation's basketball reputation here in Beijing, the American women have been the absolute bomb. And Thursday will witness perhaps the biggest day in Olympic history for the American women's teams. From 9 a.m. to midnight, six women's teams—beach volleyball, volleyball, water polo, softball, soccer and basketball—will play for gold medals or to reach the finals and the chance to play for gold medals. Here's a preview of those six contests in Beijing chronological order:

11 a.m.—Beach Volleyball: U.S. beach queens Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh face a home-sand disadvantage when they play China's favorite duo of Wang Jie and Tian Jia for the gold medal. The Chinese got the #1 seed here, which is a bit of a puzzlement since the California gals are defending Olympic champions and haven't lost a match since Aug 19th—of last year! Their winning streak now totals 106 matches and they have plowed through the Olympic field without losing a set. (The Chinese, by contrast, have been pushed to a third set three times in six matches.) Misty and Kerri may be the most well-respect and -liked athletes by the press. They are courteous to opponents, thank every official after each match and are exceptionally patient with the press, acutely aware that they are both building their brand and their sport. I wrote a NEWSWEEK article on them before the Athens Game and, after their gold-medal performance, they sent me a signed card thanking me for the coverage and with a pouch of sand from the Olympic beach attached. That is unprecedented—the “thank you" as well as the sand—in my experience through 10 Olympics. Beach volleyball is "hot" and is the only one of the Thursday's six contests that will rate live coverage on NBC prime time.

12:20—Volleyball: Women’s volleyball has been contested at the Olympics since Tokyo 1964 and the Americans have a silver and bronze to show for all their floor burns. But after a fifth-place finish in Athens, the volleyball brass brought in a living legend to coach the team—at least a living legend in China. “Jenny” Lang Ping was known as the “Iron Hammer” when she played on the 1984 Chinese Olympic team in Los Angeles, where China defeated the United States for the gold medal. She returned to the States 12 years later, for Atlanta ’96, as coach of the Chinese team that won a silver medal. Now she is trying to take the Americans to new heights. The dream final would be the United States vs. China. But first "Jenny" has to get the American ladies past Cuba, the only team to beat them in the preliminary round.

6:20 p.m.—Water Polo: Coach Guy Baker won a host of national collegiate championships at UCLA before taking over the women’s national water polo team for the first Olympic competition in Sydney. In a thrilling and controversial ending, the team lost to Australia 4-3 on a goal in the final second. Four years later, the U.S. got its revenge on Australia 6-5—but that only garnered the team a bronze medal. But last year the U.S. women’s team won the world championship—beating Australia in Australia. So guess what country the undefeated Americans have to beat to win the gold medal Thursday night? Probably not. That’s because the American women already dispatched Australia 9-8 in the semis and now will face the Netherlands, the country where women’s water polo was first competed a little more than a century ago.

6:30 p.m.—Softball: No matter the result, this will certainly be the most emotional of all these games. It may be the final softball game in Olympic history. The powers that be have thrown softball out of the Games for sins both real and imagined. One of its concerns is apparently the lack of top-flight competition to challenge the Americans, though American domination in women’s basketball is at least as pronounced. And as the ladies point out, nobody gets upset when Michael Phelps dominates. The softballers will be bidding for a clean sweep of the four Olympics in which the sport has been competed. In Beijing, the team is undefeated and has allowed only two runs in its eight games. Next year softball will apply to the International Olympic Committee for reinstatement for the 2016 Olympics, competing against six other sports for a coveted spot in the Games. It can’t hurt that IOC president Jacques Rogge was in the stands Wednesday for what turned out to be one of the most dramatic days in the game’s brief Olympic history. First the United States and Japan played eight scoreless innings—regulation games are seven—before the U.S. won 4-1. Then Japan, which could still reach the gold medal game with a win over Australia and leading 2-1 in the top of the 7^th, one out away from a rematch with the Americans, surrendered the tying run on a homer, then had the winning run thrown out at the plate in the bottom of the inning. Australia went ahead 3-2 in the 11th, but Japan tied the game in the bottom of the inning before winning it in the 12th. Now it can try to end America's softball dynasty on a doubly sour note.

8 p.m.—Basketball: Much has been made of the show being put on by the American men’s team, with Kobe and company winning its first five games by an average of 32 points. But those are close games by the standards of the undefeated American women who have won all six of their games by an average of 42 points. The U.S. has not lost a game since the Barcelona Olympics in 1992--30-0 with three gold medals--and this may be its strongest squad yet. The Beijing team combines Olympic veterans like Lisa Leslie and Diana Taurasi with a pair of dynamic, young WNBA superstars—Candace Parker, a two-time national player of the year at the University of Tennessee and 6’6” former LSU star Sylvia Fowles, who is leading the team in both scoring and rebounding. The U.S. faces Russia in the semis and, if victorious, the winner of China-Australia in the finals. While the men's team could still get clipped by a Spain or a Lithuania on an off day, there is no team that can stop this American juggernaut.

9 p.m.—Soccer: Women’s soccer captivated American fans in one glorious summer fling back in 1999. Five years later in Athens, Mia Hamm and her soccer sisters left the Olympics and the game on a high—with an overtime victory over Brazil. Tonight the U.S. women will play Brazil again for the gold medal, but the shoe is decidedly on the other foot. In truth, Brazil was the better team in Athens and the American team needed all its savvy, pluck and opportunism to escape with the gold medal. With the exodus of the starry veterans—Hamm, Julie Foudy, Kristine Lilly—and an injury to the team’s high scorer, Abby Wambach, the U.S. team is a big underdog to the speedy and creative Brazilians. (The Brazilian women play a far more “beautiful game” than the Brazilian men’s team, which resorted to total thuggery to try to slow down arch-rival Argentina in their 3-0 semi-final defeat.) In the 2007 women’s World Cup, Brazil eviscerated the Americans 4-0 in the semis, a loss that cost the U.S. coach his job, before losing to Germany in the finals. Here in Beijing they mauled Germany 4-1 to reach the finals. The Americans had a much softer path to the final and had it not been for a bizarre Japanese 5-1 romp over favored Norway would have met Brazil—and likely its demise without a medal—in the quarterfinals. In the semis, the U.S. team played its best game of the tournament, ousting Japan 4-2. The team now plays a far more attractive game under its new coach, former Swedish star Pia Sundhage, with fewer long, futile boots and more ball control through the midfield. But it has not found a breakout star who can change the game with a single rush or a moment of creative genius. At last year’s World Cup, starting goalkeeper Hope Solo was benched for the Brazil game in favor of the veteran Briana Scurry. After Brazil's victory, Solo violated all the sacred trusts of the soccer sisterhood by not only grousing about it, but by insisting she would have done better in the nets. The comments got her booted off the team and she was reinstated for the Olympics over the objects of some teammates. We will all get to see if she does any better. Actually, better may not be good enough.

Contributor Jennifer Conrad ran into Michael Phelps, posed for photos with a Ferarri, and didn't eat Italian food while doing a circuit of the National Houses. Her report:

     At each Olympics, governments set up National Houses to provide a home base for their athletes and supporters. Some are frenetic party zones where medalists stop by to scribble autographs for adoring fans. Others are showcases for their respective nations. Some are pretty dull venues for networking. And while some let just about anyone (me) breeze through the door, others are almost impossible to access. Still, I did my best to check out the Olympic action.

     Let's start with the good ones: The Heineken-sponsored Holland House, a tradition since the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, served up one of the best parties, with Dutch food (weird croquettes and fries with mayo) and hordes of orange-clad Dutch fans (seriously, for a small country, they have a lot of people in town). The tricky door policy means that if you get there early enough, you can enter by showing your passport. Once it gets too crowded, only Dutch passports are allowed in. Set up in the massive Agricultural Exhibition Center, besides big indoor and outdoor party spaces, there was a small area with exercise equipment. Which made it possible for my friend to get a computerized health analysis while I was taking a photo with a Chinese visitor who asked if I was an athlete.

...Club Bud promotes the five elements of feng shui

From the moment Hu Jintao chirped the Chinese version of "Let the Games begin!" China’s Communist leaders have loomed on the sidelines. Party royals have had their ritual moments in the spotlight. And the most prominent came during the Opening Ceremony, when the cameras of China Central Television focused on China's leaders in the customary order of rank. "Old Jiang" -- Hu’s retired predecessor Jiang Zemin -- squeezed in at number two, a routine cameo, along with his visibly frail wife. At the restaurant where I watched the extravaganza, diners guffawed loudly each time they were shown.

But not all of the leadership's air time has been colorless boilerplate. We inadvertently learned, for instance, how one Party potentate meddled behind the scenes of Zhang Yimou's Opening Ceremony. It was an unidentified Politburo member who infamously vetoed televising the little girl Yang Peiyi who sang the theme song. In came a cuter child actor, Lin Miaoke, who lip-synched it instead, as music director Chen Qigang soon revealed on Beijing Radio: “When we rehearsed on site, there were spectators from various divisions -- especially a leader from the Politburo, who gave us his opinion: it must be changed," Chen said. "The reason was it was in the national interest. The child on camera should be flawless in image, internal feelings, and expression. Lin Miaoke is excellent in those aspects, but with respect to voice, Yang Peiyi is flawless, in the view of each member of our team."

Chen's revelation fuelled gossip about an ongoing mystery: which Politburo member (allegedly) made the casting call? No one seems to have confirmed who, but there are several possible candidates. They include the propaganda chief, Liu Yunshan; the head of the Beijing Games' organizing committee, Liu Qi; the leadership’s culture and media czar, Li Changchun; and even Vice President Xi Jinping, the leadership’s Olympics point-man, and Hu's putative successor.

Then this week, it was Xi who cabled condolences to the fallen track hero Liu Xiang after he hobbled off the Olympic stage without completing a single hurdle. "We all understand that Liu quit the race due to injury," Xi said. "We hope he will relax and focus on recovery. We hope that after he recovers, he will continue to train hard and struggle harder for the national glory."

So that’s the Party line on a guy with a bum heel, in case you were wondering. It was quite an out-of-the-ordinary official statement. But then again, Liu's an athlete of extraordinary status. It's another reflection of the leadership’s impulse to set the tone quickly and compassionately on a matter plaguing people’s minds, lest they question the turn of events or blame the state for it. Xinhua added in its account: “Liu and his coach were greatly moved when they learnt the content of the telegraph from the top officials of the General Administration of Sport. They thanked the state leaders for their concern and encouragement.” (But why telegraph? After all, China's got the world's biggest population of mobile-phone users.)

Many reigning cadres have been getting out to the Games to root on the home team. In an atypically detailed puff piece, the quasi-official China News Service dubbed them “super-fans”. Xi and his wife, the patriotic pop star Peng Liyuan, helped cheer on Yao Ming and posse to a big hoops win over Germany. So did General Guo Boxiong, among other Politburo members. Retired party elder Li Ruihuan was on-hand as Li Na bowed out in the semifinals of women’s tennis. The current Number Four man in the country's top leadership, Jia Qinglin, went to watch China play Chinese Taipei in baseball – and win in a wild 12 innings. Jia's guests from the other side of the Taiwan Strait included chairman of Taiwan’s ruling Kuomintang, Wu Po-hsiung, and People First Chairman James Soong.

Among the crowds, China's leaders shed their Western suits and neckties in favor of casual shirts or tees and really got into the game, displaying a “cute side” as “ordinary people”, the China News Service noted. At China’s “peaceful battle” with the United States in women’s volleyball, Hu and first lady Liu Yongqing put their hands together in support. The Chinese leader was a paragon of fan diplomacy, according to the account. The keen observer could see that applause from Hu, dressed in a blue a shirt, was carefully “targeted”: “When the U.S. made a mistake and gave up a point, Hu did not immediately applaud. But whenever the Chinese girls struggled for a dig and won a tough point, they earned claps from Hu Jintao straight away.”

Are they ordinary fans, or “super fans”? It’s all relative. In Tuesday’s China Youth Daily, Renmin University political scientist Zhang Ming offered this commentary on the subject:

The injury that cost Liu Xiang his chance to defend his Olympic gold in Beijing is likely to cost the Chinese hurdle star financially as well. It is unclear how much the athlete will lose in terms of endorsements and ad revenue, but what is clear is that his earnings show just how much China has changed over the years. Olympic stars who once could not have expected to make a living from their sports are now finding that there is money to be made from their prowess--but that bureaucracy often takes a cut, too. NEWSWEEK’s Chinese-language partner, Newsweek Select, takes a look at how fame has brought fortune to some of the nation’s stars.

By Diao Ying
NEWSWEEK SELECT IN CHINA

Xu Haifeng was the first Chinese to win an Olympic gold medal. That was in the 1984 free pistol shot competition in Los Angeles, and it earned Xu the first national prize money for an Olympic champion--9,000 RMB (about $1,312) and a salary increase from 51.5 RMB ($7.50) to 98 RMB ($14) per month. "At that time, that was already considered a lot of money," says Xu, now the deputy director of China’s Cycling and Fencing Sports Administrative Center.

No longer. While Xu Haifeng might have been one of the first athletes to make any money out of his sport, China’s top-earning athlete is now NBA star Yao Ming, whose estimated income for 2007 was 380 million RMB ($55.4 million). The country’s second biggest earner is Shanghai’s Liu Xiang, whose 2004 Olympic gold medal in the 110-meter hurdles earned him 160 million RMB (about $23 million) last year. Both are beneficiaries of China’s changing economic system. Wei Jizhong, a consultant to the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee, and former national sports official who led the women's volleyball team to five consecutive championships, points out that during Xu Haifeng's era, people around the country were still discussing whether or not China should adopt a free-market economic system, not the commercialization of sports.  "Xu Haifeng won in 1984, but the formal decision to adopt a market economy was made after [former Communist Party leader] Deng Xiaoping's 1992 southern tour," says Wei.

The changing stakes have led to changing attitudes too. While older athletes saw their sports as more about the glory of themselves and their nation, the new generation has learned the value of packaging itself. One example of an athlete ‘on message’ is Liu Xiang as spokesman for Amway’s nutrition supplement Nutrilite. At one press conference for the brand, Liu Xiang’s first comment was a plug for the brand. "It's been my dream to represent Amway,” he said as he took his seat. “From a young age, I used Amway products my father's work unit gave to him and felt they were great." When a journalist asked about Liu's dreams for the future, the athlete did not speak about hurdles or life, but instead resolutely said, "I hope everyone will use Nutrilite."

Financial journalist Fergus Naughton reports on predictions for China's post-Games economy: 

In some ways, Beijing’s Olympic hangover started even before the opening ceremony, as multinational corporations wined and dined clients and “friends from the media”. To a cacophony of popping champagne corks and public addresses from CEO’s and their newly acquired local government chums, Olympic corporate sponsors have been buttering up clients and head office suits, introducing them to celebrities and government officials, constantly reminding them that China is the place to be – and that they should keep those money taps flowing.

     Official Olympic sponsor Adidas hosted an elaborate ceremony in a five-star downtown hotel with several headline sporting celebs including former gymnast Nadia Comaneci, swimmer Ian Thorpe,

The Great Mall: Shopping at the historic site

I went to the Great Wall today and the Atlanta Olympics broke out.

Okay, maybe it wasn't quite as tacky as Atlanta '96 where almost every inch of the downtown sidewalks was filled with folks hawking shoddy merchandise and souvenirs. But after driving some 50 kilometers northeast from the Beijing Olympic site to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, I was hoping to escape the cacophony of commerce. Instead, we—me and my Beijing hosts Melinda and Alick—had to run a gauntlet of stalls manned by hyper-aggressive merchants who shrieked cold water, beer, bananas, postcards in order to get to the lifts that would get us up the hills and onto the Wall. And we also had to take a pass on the Great Wall Restaurant, where a large Coca-Cola billboard promised that Coke went swell with noodles, dumplings and fried rice. And by the way, did we want our picture taken with some costumed ancient Chinese warriors?

We Olympic reporters are extraordinarily diligent. OK, not all of them, but definitely me. I haven't taken a day off from Olympic competition since the '98 Games in Nagano, where I went to the mountains to see the snow monkeys and followed that with a session in a traditional Japanese bathhouse. I never got to the Acropolis in Athens. But I was damned if I was going to come all the way to China for the first and possibly last time and not see its colossus. After two weeks submerged in the Olympic cocoon, the Wall beckoned with at least as much power as a two-star restaurant did at my very first Olympics in Albertville. And I lucked into the kind of day that gives lie to the canards about polluted and eternally hazy, gray skies here.
 
Hailing from Boston, I know a thing or two about great walls. And I've had the thrill of being atop the Green Monster, the famous left-field wall at Fenway Park. But even I have to admit that my home-town wall, not yet a century old and big only by baseball standards, doesn't quite measure up to this Great one. The current Wall dates back to the Ming Dynasty, which lasted more than two centuries beginning in 1368, and stretches some 4,000 miles. From our perch we could look to Beijing in the south and to what was once Outer Mongolia in the north, the great heathen threat that the Wall was built to keep out. (While the wall was largely a defensive military endeavor, Great Walls are also great place to collect taxes and assorted duties from less threatening travelers.)
 
Signs at the lift, a ski slope T-bar, warned that the Wall was no place for "weak elderly persons", but I decided to venture forth anyway. I was armed with a disposable camera, a novelty item for me since I haven't taken a picture in about a decade. So the snapshots will fit neatly into our album after my daughter's 10th birthday party. I'm a words and memories kind of guy, but I wanted a fallback in case words failed me.

Despite the warning below, I was prepared all the climbing—I think I did the equivalent of at least two Eiffel towers—to get from one watchtower to another. More-over, despite a major restoration effort by the Chinese government, the steps—narrow, broken, uneven--are more treacherous than driving in Boston. So the going is very slow. Even the young can find it daunting. One young lady from New Orleans was seated clinging to the rail, trying to shake a dizzy spell from the heat and heights. (One thing the Wall was lacking was those drive-thru or walk-thru frozen daiquiri places that New Orleans has; they would do very well.)

The classic view

Once you made it up the steps and out of the sun inside the towers, you enjoyed cool breezes and spectacular views. And my blackberry worked too, which admittedly is so not 14th century. I called my wife back home anyway. "Honey, I am on the Great Wall!" I am the embodiment of the Ugly American. Of course, the vendors were there too so the place wasn't exactly holy or remotely pristine. They were trying to hawk drinks at extortionate prices of $4 for a soda that you probably could have negotiated for 25 cents down below. Of course, they had carried them up, which demands a slightly higher price. Nobody expects you to pay asking price, but some Westerners aren't familiar or comfortable with the art/science of haggling.

Finally, we'd had our fill of beauty and breezes and breakneck risks on the staircases so we queued up for the ride down. The preferred way is a toboggan ride, with one lever controlling both speed—no more than about 19 mph—and braking, inside a metal chute that curves down the slope. There were more warnings about drinking, drugs and driving and, on top of the price of the ticket, they even offered insurance for 1 yuan extra, or about 15 cents. But I declined, confident that my auto policy back home covered all risks. Besides, I had bigger worries. As I watched the folks mount the little motorized vehicles, I noticed that, on occasion, they would whisk away the normal toboggan and offer oversized drivers an extra large one.

Fortunately, I was spared that indignity and managed to get to the bottom without rear-ending Alick in front of me. We celebrated with a lunch—beef stroganoff Beijing style—that will assure that if there is a next time at the Wall, I'm destined for the extra large toboggan.

Trapeze artists spun above the heads of the sparse crowd inside Volkswagen's pavilion on the Olympic Green, earning the approval of Yao Yuhong. "It's great," the retired scientist marveled as performers bounced, twisted and turned above Perspex half tubes displaying VW cars against a water fountain backdrop. "It's big and bold", her friend Liu Xinping agreed. The pair of elderly academics toured the Olympic Green on Sunday using an Olympic Green coupon. "How does one get one?" I asked, but Yao didn't know. She was given hers by her son.

      It seems knowing someone who knows someone may be the best -- or even the only -- way to find one of these coupons. On Sunday, I asked Sun Weide, official spokesman for the Beijing Games organizers, or Bocog, the same question - how to get one - but even he wasn't too sure of the details. This is strange as Bocog has been telling journalists for a full week now that it's doing its best to increase visitor numbers to the Green.

If the United States softball team was as smart as it is talented, it might have lost to China this afternoon in what was the final game—and a meaningless one—in the preliminary competition. The U.S. team's record was 6-0 and it had clinched the top seed in the medal round, while China was already destined for elimination.

That also happens to be the fate of the sport in the Olympics, tossed out of the games starting with London 2012*. The International Softball Federation (ISF) has launched a campaign—"Back Softball"—to seek reinstatement for 2020 at an International Olympic Committee vote in October, 2009. Several factors appear to have led to softball getting shut out of the the Games, but the one most frequently cited is the American ladies' total domination of the sport. They have won all three previous Olympic golds and are now riding a 21-game unbeaten streak in Olympic competition.

But our softball ladies are athletes, not diplomats. So they put up nine runs in the first inning and the game was stopped after five because of what we always knew as the "mercy" rule. And they bristle at the notion that, unlike Michael Phelps or the Chinese table tennis players or, once upon a time, the "Dream Team," they should be punished for their excellence. "The frustrating thing is we feel we're putting on a great show and all anybody wants to talk about is what happens when we're done," said Cat Osterman, the starting pitcher against China.

Just eight years ago in Sydney, the American softball team lost three games and barely squeaked by Japan for the gold medal. But unlike basketball, where the gulf between the United States and the world has clearly been narrowing since that Dream Team romp at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, softball has seen the American team become increasingly more dominant. The sport simply doesn't have the money of basketball, with those NBA riches, to spread its gospel and game around the world. Monica Abbott, whose perfect game against the Netherlands was the U.S.'s first-ever at the Olympics, says the other countries can't be expected to catch up overnight with what is, after all, "the American pastime", or at least the distaff version. Still, she can't understand why their excellence is held against them. "[Excellence] is what Olympics are all about," she said.

But the excellence doesn't assure a competition that is compelling or even good entertainment (and some suggest it borders on the unseemly). Theirs has been a scorched-earth performance. In seven contests to date, the team has allowed only one unearned run and, incredibly, just five hits—U.S. pitchers have thrown one perfect game and two no-hitters—while breaking the Olympic mark for home runs by a team. China managed one hit, a leadoff single today, but that actually raised the batting average of the opposition against the trio of American aces to .042. And not to be unkind to our very gracious hosts, but China—one Gold Glove caliber diving catch by the center fielder not withstanding—gave a performance in the field that could have passed for a tribute to the foibles of the '62 Mets.

American dominance isn't the only problem softball faces in convincing the IOC to reverse its decision. Though there are 131 national federations—Kosovo is the latest—for softball, the IOC appears concerned that the game hasn't reached more places and attained higher levels in those places it has already reached. And then there is the the problem of baseball, which is also having its Olympic swan song in Beijing. The IOC was exceedingly anxious to dispatch baseball—MLB refuses to send its best players, has balked at Olympic drug-testing standards and had the effrontery to establish its own World Baseball Classic—and also tossed out what many of its voters view as women's baseball. The baby with the bath water, so to speak.

At the IOC meeting next fall in Copenhagen (where the 2016 Games will be awarded to Chicago, Madrid, Tokyo or Rio de Janiero), the assemblage will consider the applications of both softball and baseball, along with five new Olympic contenders--rugby, karate, golf, squash and roller sports. At most, two will be added and while softball will spend a few million dollars on its reinstatement campaign before then, some of the other sports have a lot more financial backing. (Tiger at the Olympics anyone?)

Softball's future as an Olympic sport is very much tied to its future as a sport. The ISF reaped almost $7 million from the Athens Games four years ago, which is critical to its international mission. Moreover, it's far easier to attract sponsors when you can make your pitch on stationery bearing the five rings. "You have credibility when you're an Olympic sports," says ISF president Don Porter.

The players say they are entirely focused on Beijing, no matter how much everybody else tries to get them to focus on the future. "We're playing for the gold now," says Osterman. But the three pitching aces, the third of whom is the famously photogenic Jennie Finch, are well aware that Olympic glory may soon be a remnant of the past rather than a goal for the future. "I get five or six e-mails a day asking," Why is my daughter's Olympic dream vanishing," says Porter, at 78 a veteran of the sport's battle to get in the Games in the first place. "We're fighting for all the young girls around the world who want that Olympic dream."

*NOTE: As several commenters have pointed out, the London games are in 2012, not, as this post originally said, 2016.

As soon as hurdler Liu Xiang, obviously in pain, yanked off his competition tag and walked out of the Bird’s Nest—dashing the hopes of a nation of 1.3 billion—Chinese friends began text-messaging me. “China’s just like Liu Xiang: Can’t run anymore”, commented one. When I asked why he thought that, my friend SMS’ed back, “Badly hurt from the past and too much pressure on him…not enjoying the pure fun of sports anymore. But it’s good 2 stop 4 awhile to take it slow and do it rite.”
 
In the end, his injuries—and perhaps the intense burden of China's gold-medal aspirations—got the better of Liu. He grimaced with discomfort even as he settled into the starting block of his 110m hurdles heat Monday. He stopped after a false start, stumbled forward for a few steps, clutched his leg, and then walked out of the stadium to a stunned silence from the expectant audience.  China’s Great Hope had pulled out of the competition that had represented China’s best hope of an athletics gold medal. Not just his many fans but also Chinese security guards, journalists, and even his coach Sun Haiping broke down and wept with disappointment at Liu’s withdrawal.
 
Liu's stunning pull-out saddened many Chinese. The hopes of the entire nation had been riding on Liu, who came out of relative obscurity to win the gold medal at Athens in the 110 meter hurdles—probably the most unexpected of the 32 golds that China snagged at the 2004 Games. Never before had a Chinese man struck gold in a track and field event, and he quickly became the nation’s most famous athlete, more deified even than hoops celebrity Yao Ming.

It’s hard to overestimate how badly his compatriots wanted to see Liu repeat his golden performance on home turf. In a survey of more than 1000 Chinese respondents at the end of 2007, the majority said witnessing Liu win gold in the Bird’s Nest this August was their number one Olympic dream. Chinese columnist Ramond Zhou, who contributes to the official English-language China Daily, explained it to me this way shortly before the Games kicked off: “I only care about Liu Xiang.  His winning the gold would be like Obama winning the U.S. presidency. It’s about shattering the stereotype that Asians can’t win track and field sports. People say that because Chinese don't eat so much beef that they don't have stamina—so therefore must rely on skill." Liu was supposed to put that stereotype to rest.

But at least for now that dream has died, leaving a lot of soul-searching in its place. People are beginning to question whether it was unhealthy to burden Liu, 25, with such heavy medal hopes -- and whether it was a sign of misguided old-school priorities to make him the symbol of an entire nation's new-found international clout and success. Even before his dramatic withdrawal today, Liu has had a troubled year. On May 31 he withdrew from the Reebok Grand Prix due to a tight hamstring. A few days later—on June 8, in fact, though the numeral “8” wasn’t so lucky for Liu in that instance—he was disqualified from the Prefontaine Classic Grand Prix due to a false start.

Then at the IAAF Grand Prix in Europe, 21-year-old Cuban hurdler Dayron Robles shaved one-hundredth of a second off the 12.88 second world  record set by Liu in July 2006. Many analysts—including my colleague Quindlen Krovatin in this July 1 post in our "Countdown to Beijing" blog—began speculating whether Liu could overcome such setbacks—not to mention the intense psychological pressures which made the possibility of losing face in front of a home crowd so much more unbearable than the fear of losing a contest overseas.

Though most of his fans were devastated, some Chinese seemed to think perhaps Liu had become too famous and too spoiled too fast. Local media reported that lighting in the Bird's Nest National Stadium was readjusted to shine less brightly after Liu’s coach complained that the lights were too intense for his famous star.  We'll bring you more on Chinese reaction; not everyone had been obsessed with Liu's winning gold. “In any case, Liu wouldn’t have won had he competed,” Beijing graphic artist Lu Bin told my colleague Jonathan Ansfield today.  Lu took Liu’s pull-out in stride: “Of [all] the big sports stars, Liu Xiang’s the one who annoys me most. I bet now he’ll slowly switch over to the entertainment world.” After all, Liu's face has been plastered over gigantic billboards advertising Visa and other big name brands, and Liu was widely regarded to be the poster-boy of the 2008 Olympics.  One way or another, it looks like Liu will be remembered for a long time to come.

In the Crowd: Phelps and family after the race. Photo by Donald Miralle for NEWSWEEK

Sunday 8/17--A confession: early in week of the swimming competition, I and a lot of other American journalists would not have been too disappointed had Michael Phelps lost a race, say that 4X200 meters relay in which Jason Lezak bailed him out with a phenomenal final leg.

Nothing personal. He's a great swimmer, a total professional and a genial young man. But he's also a pool rat, with no real interests outside the water. A daily diet of Phelps and more Phelps left us struggling for new things to say and new verbs and adjectives with which to say it. Fast, faster, fastest!

With Phelps consuming all our attention, we were unable to pay much or any attention to some standout American swimmers--Aaron Piersol, Rebecca Soni, Ryan Lochte, Natalie Coughlin--whose gold-medal performances lit up The Swim Cube and whose stories, if not necessarily any more compelling than his, were at least different. When I wrote about Lochte or Ian Crocker, it was as potential foils for Phelps. When I wrote about Lezak, it was as best supporting actor. Even "Supermom" Dara Torres who arrived in Beijing on a torrent of publicity got relatively short shrift for her--extraordinary at age 41 or at any age--three silver medals.

The Phelps saga also confined a lot of reporters to The Cube, which, though my favorite of the new stadiums, began to feel rather claustrophobic. Life at pool level kept us from venturing too far--to the beach volleyball where Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh continued a winning streak that now approaches a year, to the basketball venue where Kobe and company were demonstrating that NBA players can play defense or to the volleyball courts where the U.S. men's team was playing its heart out for a coach whose family had endured an unimaginable tragedy here.

But all sports reporters, however cynical they may at times appear, began life as sports fans. And as Phelps continued to defy the odds and amaze with his combination of prowess and good fortune, we were seduced by the magnitude of his achievements and the lure of history. Once he won the two events in which he settled for bronze four years ago in Athens and passed the halfway mark, we were all pretty much on board--silently cheering him all the way and sharing his dream.

Of course, he had never shared with us what exactly his dream was. While it was implicitly defined by the events he entered, Phelps never said a word publicly about hoping to win eight gold medals and to break Mark Spitz's record of seven in one Olympics. After he claimed the eighth gold medal today in the 4X100 relay, he finally revealed it or, more precisely, just conceded the obvious: "What else could I do?" he said. "Doing all best times, winning every race--everything was accomplished that I wanted to." (Okay, he left one world record on the deck, but who's going to quibble?)

The final 4X100 medley relay, with the Americans talented at every stroke, had been regarded as one of Phelps' easiest golds. But the Australians made it anything but. When Phelps hit the water for the butterfly, the third leg of the race, he found himself swimming in third place, behind the Aussies. One hundred meters later, after Phelps' last great swim of this Olympics--almost a full second better than his Australian counterpart, the U.S. team had a comfortable lead and Lezak would have just as soon drowned as relinquish it. "This was not just for Michael, but for all of us," he said following the race..

And I guess by then I had begun to believe "for all of us" existed in a far larger sense. In some ways, what Phelps accomplished is simply unfathomable. Spitz was a great champion, but in 1972 when he won his seven golds in Munich the swimming world was a much smaller place. There were no gold medalists from Brazil or Tunisia back then. You had to beat one top American teammate, but you didn't have another hotshot Californian chasing you in Serbian colors.

I have covered 10 Olympics now for Newsweek, seen Carl Lewis, Michael Johnson, the original Dream Team, "The Magnificent Seven", Mia Hamm and her soccer sisters, Tomba "La Bomba", Gordyeva and Grinkov, Torvill and Dean and just this week the balletic gymnastics of Nastia Liukin and the historic speed of Usain Bolt. All these Olympic moments and achievements sent chills up my spine. This performance by Phelps, one that combined excellence and endurance, certainly rivals any of them, perhaps even surpasses all of them. (The superb Australian breast-stroker Liesel Jones, who won a gold medal today in the relay just before Phelps' finale, said her greatest thrill in Beijing was watching Phelps swim. Clearly a lot of other swimmers felt that way too.)

I have no need to rank these greatest Olympic hits. Each has a prominent place in the scrapbook of my mind. Same with Phelps who said every memory of this perfect week of swimming--"a fun week," he called it--is ingrained in his mind and heart. On the other hand, he is taking home a lot of souvenirs: every swimsuit, every pair of goggles, all the sweats he donned this week at the pool. And before he starts getting all secretive again about his next dream, he did admit that he has his sights set on London 2016. Maybe swimming a few different races. Is it possible that he could try for a repeat while swimming five different individual events? Phelps would say that he is living proof that you can dream big--the impossible dream--and actually achieve it. "I'm lucky to have everything I have--the talent, the drive and the excitement about the sport," he said.

Bolt Wins: A new Olympic record. Photo by Vincent Laforet for NEWSWEEK

But with the doping scandals that have engulfed so many sprint champions from Ben Johnson to Tim Montgomery to Justin Gatlin—and that's just the ones who were caught—the "world's fastest" is now always suspect bordering on presumed guilty. And don't get me started on world's fastest woman where the track record is possibly worse and the biggest star in recent years, Marion Jones, is now in prison.

When the showcase event is dirty (with American sprinters especially prominent among the cheats), it drags the entire sport down. As a result track and field is now a minor sport in the United States, well beneath lacrosse though perhaps still bigger than kayaking—and pretty much consigned to the agate type of your favorite sports page. They hold the national indoor championships in my hometown of Boston each year, in a lovely thimble of a community college gym. One more doping scandal and they'll be able to hold it in my basement.

But every four years at the Olympics, the 100 meter dash is hyped as if it still means something monumental. On Saturday night here, they sold out the Olympic stadium—91,000 folks in the stands—for a program that, besides "world's fastest", offered only some preliminary heats, the women's shot put final and the conclusion of an event, the heptathlon, that only a math PH.D could follow. (Admittedly women's shot put is one of the host's stronger track and field events and all three Chinese competitors made it to the final.)

Still, It's easy to see why we get seduced by the excitement of the 100. There is always high drama and the promise of, in the flash of an eye, a human barrier breaking. This year's Olympic contenders included three men who in one way or another have laid claim to that once-exalted title—American Tyson Gay, who won the world championship last year, and two Jamaicans, Asafa Powell, the former world recordholder, and Usain Bolt, who at just 21 and as a relative newcomer to the 100 broke Powell's mark in June. Never before had there been three men in the field who had run in the 9.7 second range. (At the U.S. Olympic Trials, Gay actually ran a 9.68, the fastest 100 in history, but it was wind-aided and, thus, won't go in the record books.)

Gay bears little resemblance to the strutting, trash-talking sprint kings, caricatures of the modern athlete, who have dominated the race in recent years. He is soft-spoken, polite and not remotely boastful. He admitted to being shocked in the athletes village when Kobe Bryant actually knew who he was and wished him good luck. Gay didn't guarantee a victory or even a medal, simply saying "I think it's about who best handles the pressure. I have faith in myself."

Nor did he spend a lot of time insisting how clean he was. All he said was that he had volunteered for the extended doping testing offered by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and that was the most he could do to convince people that he represented a clean branch of the sport. Perhaps the most conclusive proof of that came Saturday night when Gay, clearly showing the effects of a hamstring injury he suffered at the Olympic Trials, couldn't break 10 seconds in his semi-final heat and didn't even make it to the finals.

Still, that doesn't speak to those who were faster Saturday night. Certainly not to the one who was fastest of all—and all-time to boot. And we Olympic reporters have become a very cynical lot, having been burned so many times by so many sprinters that have parroted the classic refrain: I have never tested positive for drugs. I got fooled big-time in Sydney and again in Athens (as well as a few other places, including Seville and Paris). If I had to choose a theme song for these sprints, it would be The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again."

Yet I probably will. You too. So this stands as my meager protest. I'm going to name the winner—the kid Bolt in world record time of 9.69—but I refuse to make a very big deal out of it. Enough will. But I figure that If I spare you a little caring now, maybe I'll spare you a whole lot of disappointment down the line.
 

Gold: Liukin on the uneven bars. Photo: Mike Powell for NEWSWEEK

Yet on that day in Texas, my eye kept being drawn to a precocious 14-year-old who was working out along with Patterson. Later I asked one of the coaching assistants about her. She was the daughter of one of the gym owners, a former Soviet Olympic star, and the coach whispered that if I thought Patterson was good—and she was—this kid was destined to be something truly special. However she was still too young (except perhaps in China) to be eligible for the 2004 Olympic team. I was so impressed with the youngster's style that I returned to that Dallas-area gym three years later and profiled her for NEWSWEEK's year-end "Who's Next" special issue.

The young girl was, of course, Nastia Liukin and "next" turned out to be today in Beijing when Liukin soared majestically above the field and succeeded her gymmate Patterson as Olympic all-around champion. The victory came 20 years to the day that her father Valeri, who coaches her, lost the men's all around gold medal at the Seoul Olympics by just 1/10th of a point. "I hope I made up for that," she said. "I hope he enjoyed this as much as I did."

He clearly did, though he said he never dreamed that his daughter would do gymnastics—"it's so hard"—let alone follow in his Olympic footsteps. So too did everyone who witnessed her goose-bump evoking performance—including the Chinese fans who were first gracious and ultimately captivated as their own favorites finished third and sixth. After a decent score on her one pedestrian event, the vault, Liukin delivered a succession—on bars, on beam and finally, on floor—of dazzlingly complex and lyrical moves to win the gold medal by more than half a point over her teammate and defending world champion Shawn Johnson.

The promise that was so evident years ago was not fulfilled without a difficult struggle. Just before the magazine anointed her with that "who's next" (soccer's Freddy Adu and figure skater Sarah Hughes were earlier choices), she injured her ankle, the first of a long succession of nagging hurts that kept her off the mats or slightly sub-par on it. While she won a host of medals at world championships—four golds and five silvers—she slipped to fifth in the all-around at last year's worlds.

The new "it" girl was the diminutive Johnson, who won that competition and beat Liukin at both the 2008 nationals and the Olympic Trials. "It's not easy to be second," said her father. "But I believed she wasn't second. We made mistakes and we weren't ready." In the world of gymnastics, being ready means being able to repeat what you do every day in practice in the pressure-cooker that is Olympic competition. Liukin said her dad told her, 'Don't do anything better than you know how to do it. Just do it normal."

Johnson, 16, and Liukin, 18, are total contrasts in styles. The diminutive Johnson is bouncy and athletic and can light up an arena with her smile. Her performances are reminiscent of American stars like Mary Lou Retton and Kim Zmeskal and, appropriately, she wore fireplug red for the Olympic competition. Liukin is more reminiscent of some of the great Soviet and Romanian stars. While only 5'3", Nastia is lean and long-limbed and, in her pink, sometimes looks more ballerina than gymnast.

Johnson made no major mistakes and on many days, including some Olympics past, might have been good enough for gold. "I gave my heart and soul to the competition," she said afterwards. "Today was not my day. [Nastia] deserves that gold today." But all things being equal, elegance should always trump pzazz. "It has been a long journey, but every single moment has been worth it," said Liukin. "It's a dream come true. I couldn't be more thankful."

Tsinghua University professor Daniel A. Bell, watched the China-Angola basketball game with a crowd of patriotic Chinese spectators. His report:  

As a twelve-year-old boy, I took great pride in the fact that my home city, Montreal, was hosting the 1976 Olympics. It meant that Montreal was affirmed as a city of global importance. But it turned out to be, as scientists say, a false positive. The Canadian athletes did not do so well: for the first time in Olympic history, the host country did not win any gold medals. After the Olympics, the rise of the pro-independence movement led to an outflow of monolingual Anglophones and Montreal was soon replaced by Toronto as Canada's financial capital and largest city in terms of population. Today, Montreal is a cool, laid-back, bilingual city, but its glory days may be over. It's the kind of city that rarely gets mentioned on the CCN global weather report.  

A couple of days ago, I met a Danish student of physical education. He told me that Denmark had yet to win any medals in the Beijing Games, and I told him the same was true of Canada. We made a pact to support each other's teams unless they are in direct competition. But I told him I would also support China, my new home. It's also political: if China overtakes the U.S. in the gold medal race, it would be an appropriate symbol for a more desirable multi-polar political future, where no country has to power to invade another in the face of global opinion.

Yesterday was a chance to show my (new) patriotic colors. This time, I secured tickets via the elitist route—my wife's U.S.-based investment bank—for a basketball game between China and Angola. It was a must-win game for China, a loss would have resulted in elimination from the next round.

I arrived a couple of hours early with my son. It was pouring rain; the first security officer just waved us throw as I was digging through my bag looking for my ticket. We waited in line along with hundreds of others, almost exclusively Chinese. Student volunteers asked those with umbrellas to share space with the umbrellaless members of the community. I shared with a keen woman spectator from a Beijing suburb. The ever-practical Chinese also used flags for protection from the rain.

Finally they let us in, and we met my wife inside. To my surprise, she was wrapped in a giant Chinese flag. My wife is a graduate of Beijing University—perhaps the last bastion of liberal individualism in China—and normally criticizes my writings for eulogizing China and being overly critical of other countries. But she was cold and wet—and the flag also served the purpose of keeping her warm.

The audience was decked in red, with lots of flags. My wife took a picture of a plump baby with stickers of Chinese flags on his cheeks. One guy had a Kobe Bryant T-shirt with a "Zhongguo Jiayou!" (Go China!) banner on his forehead. Our section soon filled up with other Chinese patriots, including a humorous leader who led our chants.

The section below us was filled with celebrities like a winner of  the wildly popular Supergirl contest (the Chinese equivalent of "American Idol"), the CEO of Sohu (a leading Chinese language internet company) and a towering member of the 1984 Chinese women's basketball team (my son said he felt sorry for the person behind her).

We all rose for the national anthems. I usually get teary-eyed when I hear the Chinese anthem, because I first heard it when I fell in love with my wife in Oxford in May 1989, when we listened to student pro-democracy demonstrators sing along with the stirring music. We were shown on TV at the center of the arena, holding the flag, during the anthem. I was slightly embarrassed because I noticed that my hair was not combed properly.

During the warmup, the Chinese team engaged in collective exercises (warning: my son asked me not to write this because he doesn't think it's distinctive to the Chinese, but the Angolan team did not do collective exercises, so I'm leaving it in). China got off to a strong start, with a few assertive dunks by Yao Ming that he must have learned in the U.S.

Our cheering section jokingly competed with a cheering section from Angola at the other end of the arena. My neighbor booed when Angola took possession of the ball, but he also clapped when they made fancy baskets. Chinese cheerleaders came out during the time-outs—which was a clever strategy because some of the Angolan players could not resist peeking at them during the team huddle. China petered out, and it was a two point game after two quarters. We were very nervous.

At the start of the second half, a bunch of Western journalists came to our section and kicked out most of the Chinese patriots (they must have had seats higher up in the arena). It was very disappointing, I felt our sense of community under attack. Worse, several cheered against China, as though they wanted to check China's rise in the world of nations. It also struck me as breathtakingly rude: imagine if Chinese journalists were to cheer against the home team in a Western country in a game that didn't involve China. But I'm pleased to report an American journalist sitting behind me clapped loudly at Yao Ming's baskets and seemed just as swept along in the pro-China tide as me.

China did well in the second half and easily won the game, thus keeping their medal hopes alive. We were about to leave, but then one of the few remaining Chinese patriots in our section told us that our tickets entitled us to also watch the next game, between Russia and Lithuania. I jokingly asked him who we should cheer for, and he didn't seem sure of the answer. I said perhaps we should cheer for Russia, another big country with a great civilization that is recovering its former glory. But then I felt guilty, recalling that they had just invaded another country.

We went to get some snacks. I noticed another Chinese patriot who stayed behind, wearing a T-shirt  that said—in English!—"I love China ONLY". Perhaps she didn't understand the meaning of her T-shirt? Anyway, I decided to get some beer and forget about politics. Back inside, the Chinese patriots had put away their flags, I put away my notebook, and we enjoyed what turned out to be a thrilling game.

Duncan Hewitt reports on why Chinese are dissing their own soccer team:

The world might be quaking at China’s ever growing medals tally, but you wouldn’t have known it from recent front-page headlines in Chinese newspapers.  “Please forget about these Olympics”, implored Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post. “Shameful failure”, proclaimed the city’s Youth Daily.  The cause of such despair?  The pointing finger of Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho on the Youth Daily cover made it clear: the Chinese men’s soccer team had lost again, 3-0 to Brazil in their final group game, thus ending their hopes of qualifying for the Olympic quarter-finals.

Not that losing to the world’s most powerful soccer-playing nation—aided by a genuine, if somewhat out-of-form, superstar in Ronaldinho—is necessarily a matter for shame.  But Chinese fans on the internet were quick to suggest that the Brazilians had only played to 50% of their capacity, in part because they were concerned about not getting injured.  This points to the real source of the anger expressed by the Chinese press: China’s match against Belgium last Sunday—when it not only lost 2:0, but had two players sent off for crude and in one case dangerous challenges. The fact that one of them was Zheng Zhi—captain of the senior Chinese soccer team and a professional with Charlton Athletic in England, who had been drafted in to add experience and maturity—only added to the disappointment.

Internet commentary lit up with denunciations.  A posting that accused Zheng Zhi of killing Chinese soccer quickly got three hundred thousand hits.  One of China’s most famous sports writers announced he would never write about Chinese soccer again. Reaction to the Brazil-China result was predictably angry: "Please disband this team and don't waste the Chinese people's money on it any further" was a typical post on Sina.com.  Sports website Titan headlined the mock slogan: "Cherish Life, Stay Away from Chinese Football"; one of the options in its multiple-choice survey of reader’s suggestions following the defeat used a derisive pun on the Chinese word for "soccer": "national pigs, commit collective suicide!". 

The web was soon resounding with sarcastic new lyrics to the Olympic song "Beijing Welcomes You": “the Chinese football team welcomes you… our goal is always open, don’t be polite;… if you don’t score many today, we’ll let you make up for it next time.”

One thing I should note, to start, is that Beijingers aren’t accustomed to waiting out a four-hour rain delay to watch the once-bourgeois sport of tennis. So passions were stoked from the minute the action got under way. The night began with the bulk of the fans pulling for Roger Federer to the bitter end. He is the world's biggest tennis star and a well-known figure in Rolex-conscious Chinese circles. But you’d think a few more spectators might have rallied behind underdog American James Blake, who beat Federer for the first time in ten tries to advance to the semis. In the interest of anthropology for idiots, I asked a couple of Chinese fans if they thought anything should be made of their lack of enthusiasm for the African-American Blake. They didn’t, so I’ll let it rest there.

It probably wouldn’t have made much too difference where Venus Williams was from: her foe was China’s Li Na. Li pulled off a rousing upset, 7-5, 7-5, and the crowd set the tone for the trajectory of the match early. They crackled with excitement at nearly every ball off Li’s racket, and every service fault or unforced error off Venus’s. Venus did her best to take them out of the match. She dominated Li early on, smoking serves at 120 mph and searing groundstrokes Li couldn’t track down. But the crowd was an inexhaustible reserve of encouragement, pressing Li to fight back, and not always in the most Olympic of cadences. As Li was about go down 4-1, one spectator blurted in English: “Beat USA”. Then, in staccato, came another: “Beat USA”. And another: “Beat USA”.

Li Na proved as feisty as her multitude of backers, and Venus’s game unraveled quickly. Up a break, she double faulted. That’s when I heard a middle-aged couple nearby calling for her to do it again. Zai lai yi ge. “Another!” Every fault off Venus’s serve, “another.” When Li broke, the stands exploded. People waved tiny paper Chinese flags and waggled full-sized nylon ones. They roared “Li Na, Jia you”, or “Go Li Na”. Which to Western ears might have sounded like “Go Venus.” Not that Venus was under any illusions.

The Portuguese umpire was tested in the art of diplomacy. To shush the crowd before points, he initially took to uttering a singular courtesy phrase, Xie Xie: “Thank you.” His pronounced it fine, too, but the foreigner’s local touch set off a giggly buzz.

By now we were coming up on midnight, and this crowd could not contain themselves. Venus served the crucial ninth game of the first set, knotted at 4-4, and it went to deuce several times. Fault One from Venus prompted more calls for “Another!” On Li’s returns, hoots of hao qiu—“good ball!”—reverberated around the stadium. The umpire had to break in: “Ladies and gentlemen, please do not cry out during play. Thank you.” Venus won the game without ever complaining, but she didn’t seem to be a happy camper either. (Neither, perhaps, was her sister Serena, who was getting bounced of the Games by Elena Dementieva on another court).

As the players switched sides, a pre-recorded message played in Chinese, French, and English: “Ladies and gentlemen, in the spirit of the Olympics please do applaud errors made by the athletes. And as a courtesy to the athletes, please maintain silence [during the action].” Spectators were also requested to remain seated except during the changeover. Which proved an awful lot to ask of the pumped-up Chinese fans. But the organizers did what they could to entertain. In the next game Li broke serve again, which set her up to serve out the set. A Chinese R&B track played, people clapped to the beat, then Li closed out the set. Later they would play a ska rendition of “You Are My Sunshine”, cut by the seminal Beijing punk band Reflector.

On a few occasions my ears picked up individual Chinese fans hollering “Kill It” as Li wound up for a smash. At 4-4 in the second set, shouts of “Go Li Na” rang out just as Venus was about to serve. But the catcalling and mean-spiritedness only occurred in isolated in patches. When the reigning Wimbledon champ walloped a running volley for a winner, people applauded appreciatively. Afterward, Li commended the crowd. “Wow, I don’t think you could see that in another country.” The mad zeal for Li didn’t really translate into anti-American hostility—more like a patent disregard for tennis P.C. The only time the crowd did shut up was when Li was serving at match point. Even then the stands vibrated. “SHHHH!”

From the moment the news spread here that Russia had invaded Georgia, marring the one-world and peace imagery of Beijing '08's Opening Ceremonies, reporters were looking for a Georgia-Russia athletic showdown that might serve as a metaphor for that struggle.

The first such opportunity was at the fencing venue, a semi-finals in sabre, but unfortunately the victorious Georgian, Sada Jacobson, turned out to be an American from Atlanta. As a Yale graduate, Jacobson no doubt has some intelligent opinions on the conflict, but it wouldn't exactly rise to the level of the visceral, "vengeance is mine" sentiments folks here were searching for.

Not to be deterred, reporters next took their quest to the sands of beach volleyball where a Georgian pair was pitted against a Russian duo and perhaps—who knew?—even establishing a beachhead. This Georgia did, in fact, turn out to be the former Soviet Republic. But the players turned out of be faux Georgians, Brazilians named Gomes and Terceiro cashing in on an opportunity to play under the Georgian flag. And while they no doubt felt some fealty to their national sponsor, the notion of tanks in the streets of Tbilisi did not exactly threaten their family or friends or possibly anyone they knew, though one of them did say he had met the Georgian president's wife.

Finally, though, perseverance was rewarded. When a Georgian judo champion, Irakli Tsirekidze won gold in the 90 KG class, his path to the Olympic championship included a semi-final conquest of a Russian. As he walked off victorious, Tsirekidze conspicuously pointed to the team insignia on his uniform and later told reporters through a translator, "It means a lot to for Georgia because, as you know, there is a conflict now." But when reporters tried to pursue that matter in the post-competition press conference, the Chinese monitor refused to allow any political questions to be translated.

Still, even with the language barrier and the Chinese squeamishness about political discussion, every reporter believed they had come away with a precise understanding of what the Georgian had meant by his gesture: "Up yours, Russia!" It was exactly the metaphor they were hoping for.

Were you at all surprised China took the women's team gymnastics gold? Much ink has been expended on how tiny and undeveloped (read: young) these athletes looked out there. The New York Times for one has probed whether several of the female team members met the required age of 16. Coaching legend Bela Karolyi went so far as to brand them "half-people". But the truth isn't as simple as you might think. Are some Chinese athletes younger than their I.D. documents say? Probably. But they could be older than has been reported, too. Just like almost all statistics in China, athletes' ages can be high-balled or low-balled, depending on age limits or other considerations at the time. Young prospects are typically drafted from the home into local sports schools and molded by provincial squads before being recruited to represent the country. Multiple alterations in age can occur in that span.

Indeed, it's becoming routine for China's National Bureau of Statistics to revise its GDP growth figures upward, officially to account for an expanding service sector, but also amidst pressure to reconcile the national average with conspicuous higher stats reported by local authorities across the nation. The higher provincial numbers may be closer to reality but are still often thought to be doctored down by grassroots officials (lowballing the numbers means local governments can evade taxes, just like everyone else in China, not to mention scrutiny over pork-barrel projects). The NBS calls its statistical rectification system "squeezing out the water," and claims it to be somewhat scientific.

So the next time you see a tiny Chinese gymnast who you think must be no more than 13 years old, it could be that she was actually 8 when she was gobbled up by China's sports machine—but her parents reported her age as 6 to suggest she was more malleable, trainable and promising. Or it may be that her provincial coaches shaved many months off her age to enter her in a junior competition, with an eye on the prize of placing her on the national team. Which might mean that by the time she became Olympics material, her age had to be "rectified" up, closer to the real deal. Perhaps. 

Any public endeavor on the scale of the Olympics has its bloopers. Entries into the Beijing Games' hit list of "oops" began mounting up even before the last sparkler from Friday's opening ceremonies died out. For one thing, some of the extravaganza's pyrotechnic wizardry turned out to be computer-generated special effects. Nearly all but the last of those gigantic fireworks “footprints” in the sky, which were shown on TV—awing four billion viewers worldwide as they "walked" from Tiananmen Square to the Bird's Nest—were in fact filmed last year and spliced digitally into the televised version.

And that really cute little girl singing the iconic song "Ode to the Motherland", the pixieish 9-year-old Lin Miaoke, was actually lip-synching to the voice of that not-quite-so-cute 7-year-old Yang Peiyi. Apparently a Politburo member decided Lin's voice wouldn't cut it while Yang's orthodontically challenged appearance was not ready for prime time. (I kept telling people this would be a made-for-TV "virtual Olympics".)

If you're a geek you'll recognize the fatal Blue Screen of Death, symbol of bugs and glitches in the Microsoft operating system

As if that's not tacky enough, now we hear about the cameo appearance made that evening by the all-too-familiar Blue Screen of Death. The BSOD message usually opens with the sentence: "A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer." Geeks consider it an icon of the many bugs and glitches in the Windows operating system.

Oh yes, the Chinese computer wizards who helped bring us the greatest show on earth Friday, and indeed the Olympics themselves, also confessed that all the computers used by Beijing Games organizers were programmed cautiously with Windows XP instead of Microsoft's newer Vista—because the latter has a penchant for becoming "not stable.” Bill Gates, who was in the audience at the opening ceremony, was apparently unaware that his presence was being eclipsed by these other stars of the Microsoft universe. Credit for zooming in on the Blue Screen of Death goes to the Website Gizmodo, where someone left a comment saying, “that's awesome, only a nerd would notice this.”

I should also mention that what looks like a rather smartly dressed human fly jogging 70 meters in mid-air, studiously ignoring the nearby Blue Screen of Death, is gymnast-turned-sportswear-mogul Li Ning, who is now space-walking all the way to the bank. As Fergus Naughton blogged about earlier, Li saw stock prices in his Hong Kong-listed Li Ning Co. Ltd..surge after he lit the Olympic torch at the highlight of Friday’s blowout. Li won six medals at the ’84 LA Games; he went on to head a sports apparel and accessories empire which, with 10.5 percent share of China's sportswear market, is now racing to catch up with Olympic sponsor Adidas's 15.6 percent and Nike's 16.7 percent share. Friday's one giant (CGI) leap for mankind made stocks controlled by Li USD 30 million more valuable by Monday—not bad for a single act of passive ambush marketing.

Apropos of Li Ning's $30-million-dollar space walk, his firm is providing athletic wear for the Olympic teams of China, Spain and Sweden. Which brings us to another of the Games’ bloopers. Everyone’s tut-tutting over the fact that the Spanish Olympic basketball team posed for a promotional ad that shows them—yup, all 15 of them—using their fingers to pull their eyes into slant-eyed squints. The image has been running in Spanish papers since Friday, part of a publicity campaign for team sponsor Seur, a courier firm in Spain. A Seur representative in Madrid said the firm meant no offense but had no immediate plans to pull the ad, which was slated to run until the end of the Games.

On his blog, point guard Jose Manuel Calderon—who also plays for NBA’s Toronto Raptors—said the team was responding to a request from the photographer and made what they thought “would be interpreted as an affectionate gesture." He added, "Some of my best friends in Toronto are originally Chinese, including one of our sponsors, the brand Li Ning." Frank Zhang, Li Ning's director of government and public affairs, played down the incident. "We don't think this is an insulting gesture to the Chinese…the gesture shows that the Spanish team is so humorous, relaxing and cute. They sat around a dragon pattern, which we think showed respect to the Chinese.”

Not everyone agrees. The Spanish team was consistently booed during its Tuesday game against China; world champion Spain won 85-75. The Chinese jeering was perhaps the most conspicuous public display of negative partisanship during the Games so far. Local residents have been instructed to be good sports by Chinese authorities, who have carefully vetted “approved” cheers that the audience may use. Booing isn't one of them.

The Chinese phrase meiyou, meaning "don't have",  is a dreaded pronouncement in the food industry here. It can prophesy the unavailability of everything from fresh basil to those 100 bottles of imported wine you'd ordered ages ago. Municipal authorities recently estimated between 400,000 and 450,000 foreigners would visit Beijing over the month of August—and somebody needs to feed them. If that influx of extra mouths isn't enough of a challenge,  transportation regulations, stricter security codes, and unpredictable consumer behavior during the Olympics have complicated this gargantuan gastronomic undertaking. Even so, local eateries are finding ways to try to ensure that meiyou is the discouraging word that rarely is heard.

Traffic restrictions, which were intended to reduce transport times and cut vehicle emissions, has complicated access to foodstuffs. Cars are allowed on the road every other day according to a system of alternating, even-odd license plates. That means distribution channels are instantly cut in half. Jim Spear, co-founder of The Schoolhouse at Mutianyu, a dining and hotel venture specializing in locally-grown ingredients, was adamant about the policy’s negative impact: “We’ve been really, truly affected by transportation regulations. We still pay the cost of the vehicle and driver for our regular deliveries; and now, we have to pay yet another one for the other days.”

Bela says: when the American women took the world team gymnastics championship away from the Chinese last year, it ratcheted up the pressure on the host team.

Bela says: the best result in the preliminaries is always a close second, which is exactly what the American team achieved; it re-established the Chinese as the favorites, while only adding to the pressure.

Bela says: the U.S. has a big experience edge in the finals with four gymnasts--Shawn Johnson, Nastia Liukin, Alicia Sacramone and Chellsie Memmel--who've won team and individual gold medals at the world championship level.

Bela says: with only three gymnasts performing on each rotation--vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor exercise-in the finals, advantage U.S, since the team boasts the two top gymnasts in the world in Johnson and Liukin. They finished 1-2 in the Olympic preliminary competition, while the top two Chinese girls were 3rd and 7th.

Bela says: the Chinese have a history of meltdowns in major competitions. With the Chinese following the Americans onto the floor for final rotation, they could very well crash and burn.

Bela says: the Americans are going to win the gold medal.

Bela is, of course, Bela Karolyi, who is to women's gymnastics as Confucius is to all life here in China. He has earned his reputation as a sage across 40 unrivaled years on the mats: coach of Olympic icons Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton; key architect of the Atlanta '96 "Magnificent Seven" and personal coach of team hero Kerri Strug. And while his wife, Marta, holds the official title as women's team coordinator, on their ranch outside Houston, Bela still helps forge a team mentality out of six girls from six different gyms in five different states.

But on Wednesday in Beijing's National Indoor Stadium, nothing Bela predicted came to pass, as the Chinese team whipped the home crowd into a frenzy while they whipped the United States for the gold medal. Indeed when the nerves showed up in the second half of the competition, they were borne almost entirely by the American team. Trailing by slightly more than one point after two excellent rotations--on vault and uneven bars—by both teams, the rivals came to the treacherous balance beam. China wobbled first when its first gymnasts slipped off the bar. But the first American, the veteran team leader Alicia Sacramone one-upped or more accurately one-downed her. Sacramone, at 20 the oldest member of the U.S. team, failed to mount the bar successfully, a shocking stumble that that squandered an opening left by China.

Still, the two American stalwarts, Liukin and Johnson, produced standout routines and, even with Sacramone's mistake, reduced China's lead to a single point going to the final round—floor exercise. But the meltdown that Bela predicted came on the other side. Sacramone was clearly shaken by her problem on—and off—the beam. And despite her steely reputation, she had scant time to regain her composure before being first up for floor exercises—and perhaps never did. In an early tumbling pass, she came up short and fell back on her butt. On another, she stepped out of bounds. Her score of 14.125 was the only tally under 15 for either squad. The disaster proved contagious, as both Liukin and Johnson also stepped out of bounds, perhaps by way of consoling their distraught teammate once they had no chance to catch the Chinese. "It's a bummer with Alicia," U.S. Gymnastics Federation chief Steve Penn. "She has been such a great leader and inspiration to these kids. But in the end I think they will be happy they are going home with a medal around their necks."

There was no doubt which team was superior on this day. But that doesn't mean some controversy won't linger. Karolyi and other have insisted that half the Chinese team did not meet the age requirements and certainly at a glance that seemed obvious. Bela has, in fact, been railing about the stupidity of the minimum age for years now. After all, Nadia Comaneci was 14 in 1976 when she gave perhaps the most memorable performance in Olympic gymnastics history. The bodies of younger girls are better suited to the sport, at least to the uneven bars and balance beam, and their lack of sophistication sometimes spares them the problems with nerves that affect older gymnasts who fully realize what is at stake.

But while Bela points the finger at the Chinese, the American team refused to look for any excuses. Asked about the age controversy, Sacramone shrugged it off, "I don't look 20 either," she said.

For some, the business of the Games is...business. Beijing-based financial journalist Fergus Naughton explains how Li Ning Co. Ltd. -- named after the Chinese gymnast who lit the Olympic flame Friday at the sensational finale of the opening ceremony -- is cashing in:

Since winning three gold medals in the ‘84 LA Games, Li Ning has again left his competition in the starting blocks—after his company’s stock soared the in the first day of trading since the gymnastics hero ignited the Olympic cauldron at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics on Friday night.

Li Ning’s sports shoe and apparel brand, established in 1990, left its two Olympic sponsorship rivals eating Beijing dust as its stock raced up 3.52 pct in trade Monday. Adidas came in silver, hitting the finishing line up USD 3.29, or 1.05 pct, at USD 32.96 whilst Nike was last trailing the field up USD 0.32, or 0.51 pct, at USD 63.27.

It was Li Ning—and not a Sichuan panda with a flame-throwing device attached to his noggin, as multiple rumors had speculated it would be—who lit the Olympic flame that will burn until the end of the Games.

And what a coup it turned out to be.

The man, the legend, the brand label that looks like Nike’s “swoosh,” has managed to usurp global sportswear giants in a corporate battle ground that has seen millions of dollars pumped into grandiose market penetration drives.Adidas has Yao Ming, Nike has Yi Jianlian, and Li Ning has China.

If you walk down Wangfujing, Beijing’s downtown retail strip, your senses are bombarded with highstreet logos, brand names and mottoes.However the one that demands a double take are those appearing above two stores virtually facing off on opposite sides of the street.

“Anything is Possible” the nearest Li Ning store roars from letters several feet high.

“Impossible is Nothing” the Adidas store across the road chants back.

A laughable situation—and much debated IPR issue (if memory serves, Li Ning’s slogan came out first)—it may be. But Li Ning has succeeded in coming to the world’s attention as a serious player in the global sportswear market. As well as sponsoring several individual Chinese teams, the company also snatched deals with the Spanish and Swedish Olympic squads.

But global domination can wait. Li Ning is building on its current 10 pct share of China’s burgeoning sportswear sector. Over the past several months—and despite turbulence in global markets—textile and sportswear stocks in mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore have seen sturdy trading volumes and buttressed investor confidence in the belief that China’s leisure industry is set for robust growth in the aftermath of the Olympics.

Who could blame them?

Walk into any downtown department store and you see the usual suspects—Adidas, Nike, Puma, Reebok—and in amongst them all, with the bombast befitting a global sports brand, is Li Ning.

However, it may take some time for western consumers to latch on to China’s born-again sports star.“The stuff is kind of cool, in a cheesy kind of way,” an American Olympic tourist said at the aforementioned Li Ning store on Wangfujing.“The guys back home will love it,” he said, adjusting his Van Dutch baseball cap.

Had he ever heard of Li Ning before Friday night?

“Li who?”

Touché.

Chinese gymnastics coach Huang Yubin can keep his job—and for that matter, his life. The pressure on his charges to ante up gold to China’s mounting haul was colossal. They all knew it, too. In Sydney, the team took China’s virgin gold in the event. Then in Athens they distinguished themselves as the goats in an otherwise stellar Chinese campaign, bringing home only a lonely gold on pommel horse. Still, they’ve won seven of the last eight world team titles and China's leading star, Yang Wei, is the reigning all-around world champion. Yang and two other seasoned Olympians were back for Beijing. The day they entered the athletes village, Huang remarked confidently that if his squad flopped again as in Athens, “I’ll jump off a building.” The Chinese press duly took note.

As it turned it out Huang’s charges landed enough of their jumps to save his hide. China won by a hefty margin of more than seven points. Perennial rival Japan took silver in an unmemorable showing. And how about those gimpy Americans: smarting after twin brothers Paul and Morgan Hamm went down to injury just before the Games, they managed to nip the Germans and pick up a cathartic bronze of their own. But they’d came in with little to lose, in stark contrast with China. At the news conference afterward, a Chinese journalist informed Huang that he was off the hook. Huang indulged him with a smirk. “Thanks for not making me jump off a building.”

Early on it appeared he just might have to make that leap. China started out jittery. Chen Yibing skirted the line on the floor exercise, costing the team a steep deduction. Yang Wei had a clean swivel on the pommel horse but got stingy marks, eliciting hisses from the crowd. Meanwhile the U.S. was hot, particularly Jonathan Horton. After the first two rotations China lagged behind in fifth place. During the competition I spotted Huang seated up in the stands. His arms crossed, he appeared catatonic. The only consolation was that Japan was doing worse.

China looked like it would take control on their next rotation, the Rings. Huang Xu came down flawlessly. Yang Wei’s legs quivered visibly, but he held his landing to a single hop. And Chen Yibing nailed his. The National Indoor Stadium was enrapt in a chorus of Zhongguo jia you, Go China. The home crowd was waving more five-star Chinese flags than I’d seen at all the previous events I'd attended combined. That the Chinese were paired with the Japanese only enhanced the suspense in the stands. People went practically mute whenever it was Japan’s turn, but they never crossed the line to booing or hissing.

Chinese had edged within one point of the lead. But the Americans put up a valiant fight. In the fourth rotation, Horton and Spring both hit sure landings. This set off an intriguing clash of cheers in the stands. America supporters scattered around the stadium joined together in a chant. “USA, USA,USA…”. Whereupon the Chinese majority quickly drowned them out in “Jia you, jia you, jia you”. I asked a Beijing newspaper reporter to my side what he made of the moment. “Every country’s fans are the same,” he observed.

China responded to them in style on the Vault. For a second time, Chen Yibing teetered outside the line on landing. But Yang Wei came through solidly and the third-time Olympian Li Xiaopeng was near perfect. China edged ahead. On the parallel bars, Yang Wei and Li Xiaoping both landed strong. Heading into the final rotation, China was in command with five point-plus in breathing room.

Technically speaking, this really was the Chinese men's contest to lose. The higher level of difficulty of their routines gave them a distinct advantage coming in. The Americans had a chance to take the competition down to the wire but the effect of the loss of the Hamm brothers, the only team members with Olympic experience, became apparent. Joey Hagerty wobbled and went out of bounds on the Floor Exercise. American Alexander Artemev was positively boogeying on the Pommel, but it was not nearly enough.

The finishing touch, an elegant landing off the high bar, came from a diminutive 20-year-old named Zou Kai, who is from earthquake-stricken province of Sichuan. After the quake in May, the story goes, Zou lost touch with his family initially and was anxious to leave training to search for them. But they turned up before he left so Zou stuck with the team. Now he can go home with a gold medal.

One big question we've all pondered in the run-up to the Games was how jingoistic the home crowd might seem, especially given the chauvinism exhibited by some Chinese when the torch relay ran into European protests in April. Author and Tsinghua University professor Daniel A. Bell, who contributed a guest blog yesterday on "Confucius and the Games", gauged the mood as he joined Chinese spectators for what turned out to be one of the most electrifying events of the Olympics thus far:

The swimming competitions were in full swing on Day Three of the Games. I was lucky enough to get tickets via the first round of the lottery system that was open to Chinese citizens: I used my Chinese wife's ID along with the IDs of her parents to apply for various competitions, including swimming. But we got only two tickets and I brought along my 13 year old son, who holds an American passport because he was born in the US (I'm Canadian). We sat in the "Chinese" section, though there were a few foreigners who must have deployed a similar strategy.

The stunning aquatics venue is surprisingly intimate. On our side, there could not have been more than a few thousand seats, with journalists, dignitaries, and official team supporters on the other side. Strangely enough, there were a few thousand empty seats on that side, perhaps because they didn't want to mix ordinary supporters with the official crowd. Security was not overbearing, with several hundred college volunteers apparently doing the bulk of the work.

An elderly couple from Heilongjiang, China's northernmost province, was seated on my left. They'd come to Beijing because they had succeeded in getting tickets for this event. We chatted for a while. Two younger males with Chinese flags sat on my son's right.  The events began with introductions of two referees (I didn't even know there were referees in swimming). One was Ukrainian and the other Japanese, and you can guess which one had more applause. Then they introduced the judges, including one Chinese who was cheered loudly.

The first competition was a 100 metres backstroke women's semi-final. They introduced the swimmers, including one Japanese. My neighbor didn't clap. One of the swimmers was Canadian, and my neighbor clapped loudly, looking at me. I was pleased, and I told my son to clap as well. He refused—he may be entering a rebellious phase—and I took his hands and made him clap, which he wasn't too pleased about. The Canadian swimmer came in fifth, unfortunately, and didn't make the cut.

The next event was the 200 meter men's freestyle and the crowd really came to life when Michael Phelps was announced. The Chinese audience obviously loves a winner—Kobe Bryant had the loudest cheers at the opening ceremony—and will overlook such details as national origin in such cases. The 100 meters women's butterfly final was next. One of the participants was Chinese, who drew loud cheers from the audience. The swimmer, sadly, didn't do well in the race itself, which was won by an Australian.

Then it was the 100 meters men's breaststroke final, which was won by a Japanese swimmer in world record time. My neighbor's wife clapped loudly in appreciation, followed by my neighbor. The young Chinese patriots sitting next to my son left before the medal ceremony: I thought they were objecting to the Japanese victors, but they never came back so perhaps they just went to find better seats.

My neighbors seemed surprised when they had to stand for the medal presentation ceremony, but they did so and solemnly listened to the Japanese national anthem, followed by clapping. I clapped after they did. The Japanese victor kept his cool and didn't shed  any tears during the ceremony.

Then it was the medal ceremony for the women's 100 meter butterfly stroke, and the Australian gold medal winner seemed to win the crowd's appreciation with her somewhat embarrassed look as she was handed the gold medal. My neighbor disapproved somewhat as she went to kiss her partner in the stands afterward, but his eyes welled up when she embraced her mother.

As I was observing all this, it occurred to me that the swimming itself appeared rather boring. Unlike, say, Olympian badminton, where the players seem to have superhuman reflexes and the spectators can just gasp in admiration, the swimmers in the Olympic pool don't seem all that different than fast swimmers in any other pool and even the new world records seemed somewhat anticlimactic.

 But then came the big race, perhaps the most exciting sporting event I have ever witnessed.

The last competition of the day was the men's 4 X 100 meters free style race. The crowd cheered loudly for the US team, led off by Michael Phelps. The race was gripping. The first swimmer—an Australian—beat the world record for the 100 meters freestyle. But his team faded afterward, one of those moments when a team broke a world record  but lost the race anyway. Then the French team took over, and led until the final lap, when they were overtaken by the last American swimmer, who won by 0.08 seconds, shattering the world record by more than four seconds.

The crowd went wild. I've never seen so much enthusiasm for what should be the opposing team—the Americans and the Chinese are competing for the Olympic gold medal count. Being Canadian, I would normally cheer against the Americans. But my son was so happy his emotion swept me along as well.

It was time to go. The elderly man from Heilongjiang gave me a firm handshake. I told him that although China and Canada had fared poorly, we still had a great time. He concurred, his wife laughing along. I'm afraid those looking for Chinese chauvinism at this Olympics are likely to be disappointed.

The Beijing Olympics are in a rather remote and self-contained setting, with very little else (read restaurants or bars) of interests in the vicinity. So getting a little stir crazy, me and pal Al escaped for a few hours for a movie premiere at USA House, the social and business center of the U.S. Olympic Team.

Our business was jumbo shrimp, Thai chicken, crab salad, lamb chops climaxed by a course of pure schmaltz. I am of an ethnicity that does not mean that as a pejorative, be it schmaltz on a plate or schmaltz delivered in non-food fashion.

The latter happened to be the case that evening, delivered in 40-minute film called "Let It Out: The Movie", an emotional recalling of great Olympic moments by Olympians, their family members and, in some cases, just plain fans. The documentary, made by twin sisters Lisa Lax and Nancy Stern, plumbs familiar terrain: the "Miracle on Ice"; Michael Johnson's record-smashing 200 meters; Kerri Strug vaulting on an injured ankle; Muhammad Ali lighting the Olympic flame in Atlanta; the golden Olympic exit of Mia Hamm and her "girls of summer."

But all these familiar are tried and true and the interviews, if not necessarily providing fresh insight ( though every moment with hockey hero Mike Eruzione's dad, "Jeep" Eruzione, is a classic), are woven nicely through the film. It is also a clever marketing initiative for the film's sponsor, Kleenex, because the movie tugs on the heartstrings and, for those of us who are vulnerable to that kind of thing, becomes a bit of a "weepie." I had to nab a tissue or two (though nowhere near the number of shrimp I speared.)

While seeing the Ali moment certainly stirred a lot of juices, the single best moment for me was the sole non-American highlight featuring British runner Derrick Redmond in the '92 Barcelona Olympics. During the 400 meters, Redmond pulled a hamstring and went to his knees on the track. But he got up and began hopping toward the finish line. Suddenly a man hurdled out of the stands, forced his way past security and ran to Redmond's side. It was his father and, with his son's arm around his shoulders, he got Derrick across that finish line. Just typing it has me welling up. Where's a sponsor when you need it?

And shrimp jokes aside, it reminded me of a career of special privilege. I have now reported from 10 Olympics and personally witnessed every single moment featured in the movie with the exception of the Jesse Owens/Owen's granddaughter segment and the "Miracle on Ice". They were unbelievable live and hold up terrifically well in the retelling.

The film will be shown in 25 different American cities Wednesday and on Thursday will be available for viewing on letitout.com.

Visiting Western revelers in Beijing can now breathe a sigh of relief. For one, it turns out the city air, however murky, does actually support human life—and even outdoor Olympic exertion. And Beijing, despite widely publicized concerns that it would be host to the “no-fun” Games (through some reporting of my own, admittedly), has turned out to be, well, kind of fun.

Originally, bar-owners reported that outdoor and rooftop seating were likely to be limited, as their al fresco tables were carted away and terraces threatened by shut-down unless appropriate registration steps were taken. It was predicted that a 2 A.M.curfew—a geriatric hour for Beijingers accustomed to service staff that will stay as long as there are paying customers—would be imposed. All live music venues faced a slew of previously un-enforced regulations that darkened many a bandstand—only temporarily, it turns out.

After the first Olympic weekend in Beijing, little evidence of killjoy regulation reared its head. Susan Yan, the owner of Passby Bar, had formerly expected her roof garden to be shut down, along with those of all other bars and restaurants lining the pedestrian walkway and hipster hang-out Nanluoguxiang. Instead, “everything was normal.” Moreover Greg Dover, a Canadian who manages Bar Blu on Sanlitun bar street, had worried about early curfews, but says that instead, “we had a good weekend, with no problems. Everybody was happy...Yes, we stayed open past 2.” Stefano Fin, proprietor of street-side Aperitivo, described the Sanlitun district as “packed.” D-22, which faced a period of uncertainty in regards to its live-music stage, now boasts a busy calendar straight through the month of August.

Jim Boyce, a well-read blogger who commentates on Beijing’s nightlife, argues the regulators simply needed to survive pre-game jitters. “These guys are over the initial hiccup, and they’ve realized the foreigners aren’t gonna go crazy. So we’re fine.”

As for the clientele, prior to the Olympics there was a mood of distrust, the result of stringent and continuous security and identity checks within venues which began two weeks before the opening ceremonies. Certainly, the spate of expatriate departures caused by visa cutbacks didn’t help. There had been rumors of corporate-monopolized venues, which would exclude the common party-person from access to the revelry inside. When the South China Morning Post reported that bars were instructed by local authorities to ban black people (which remains an unconfirmed assertion), the city’s festive mood seemed altogether soured.

Yet, for Edward Wang, a Beijing-based Chinese-American university student, and his group of friends, this weekend was typical: “we stayed out until late—I think 4 A.M.—and it was the same as usual on Sanlitun.” His friend, Jonathan Liu, noticed that nobody was indulging in the illicit drugs that were once common along the bar strip, and “there was a whole lot more security...but otherwise, it was the same [as before].”

Men in Black: security guards man the entrance

Yesterday, Guo Jingjing (whom I've previously profiled here as part of my increasingly prophetic Red Star series) and her partner Wu Minxia (who continues to cower in her compatriot's shadow) struck gold in the Women's Synchronised 3m Springboard, an event they've won in the past and were expected to win this year as well.

Despite daunting pressure compounded by a string of lackluster performances earlier this year, Guo and Wu exceeded expectations and were indubitably the best divers, as evidenced by this series of photos taken by Newsweek's Vincent Laforet (scroll down past the weightlifters). The other pairs look not so much synchronized as spastic, and their facial expressions seem to say, "I know I'm a hot mess!"

Note also how Guo's impeccable form is appreciably superior to Wu's. That's why Guo dates the heir to a billion-dollar Hong Kong real estate fortune and appears in ads for everything from pasteurized milk to hair care products, while Wu languishes in comparative obscurity.

Guo and Wu's combined efforts captured China's fifth gold, a number that has since risen to eight (if you're interested in monitoring the medal count, I recommend BOCOG's official standings, although for a quick fix you can simply type "medal count" into Google).

That puts the Middle Kingdom well ahead of the United States, which only has three -- although America continues to lead the overall medal count with 12 compared to China's 11 as of 6:00 PM Monday, Beijing time. Another Olympic-caliber display of precision and grace, Lin Yue and Huo Liang's gold in the Men's Synchronized 10m Platform, seems to confirm that China's diving dominance will remain unchallenged in this Olympics.

Expect to see other Red Star athletes capturing gold in the next two weeks. Strong performances by diminutive weightlifters Long Qingquan and Chen Xiexia bode well for Zhang Guozheng. (By the way, am I the only person who thinks Turkey's Sibel Ozkan, who took the silver behind Chen in the women's 48-kilogram weight-lifting category, is kinda blazing?)

Anyway, I'd go so far as to guarantee a gold for every Red Star athlete I've profiled in the past in "Countdown to Beijing", our blog about the run-up to the Games. But after the Redeem Team schooled Yi Jianlian & Co. last night to the realities of 21st century basketball (simply put, you can't just throw 7-foot players at the problem), I'm predicting USA all the way!

Regardless, congratulations to Guo, who plans to retire after the '08 Games. I'm sorry I ever doubted you, and I look forward to your individual performance in the Women's 3m Springboard Final on Sunday, August 17.
 

The Olympics is the world's greatest sports contest and it'd be strange to come to the world's greatest sporting event, or even simply have it arrive on the doorstep as has happened for those of us who live in Beijing year-round, without catching any sport. So today, I headed for the men's diving finals. They were battling for the gold medal for synchronized pair-diving off the 10 meter platform (the highest board, if like me you're new to this).

The event was a gold medal chance for one of the youngest athletes in the Beijing Olympics, 14-year old schoolboy Thomas Daley from the UK. He lost, ending last among the eight teams along with his diving partner Blake Aldridge, aged 26. The Chinese pair won, and the US team bumped along in the middle through all six dives in the contest. When it was over, the US duo was placed fifth.

An ugly spat then erupted between the British prodigy and his partner after the event as Aldridge blamed his much younger team-mate for their dismal ranking. "Tom was very nervous, more so than ever before. I think he really struggled to get through the competition, and as his partner it was hard for me to get up there and try and ease him into it," Aldridge said.

Aldridge revealed that 14-year old had "had a pop" at him before their final dive. "When we were sitting down I saw my mum in the audience and I asked her to give me a call but Tom went to me: 'What are you on the phone for? We're in a competition and we've got another dive to do'", Aldridge said. "That's just Tom being over-nervous. That's how it was today. Tom should not be worrying about what I'm doing. Today he was worrying about everyone and everything and for me that is really the sole reason why he didn't perform today." Nonetheless, even the pair's previous personal best of 446 points wouldn't have got them the bronze today.

Though he's young, Daley (still only an inch over 5 feet tall) showed that he's already seasoned at batting off journalists. "It was a great experience....It just didn't happen for us today", he said smoothly. He admitted to being "very nervous" - as indeed he was. He could be seen sucking in air before dives, but insisted he'd enjoyed himself, learned valuable lessons for the 2012 Games and was looking forward to competing in the individual 10 meter platform event. Aldridge is not competing in any other events in Beijing which might explain the depth of his disappointment. "For me, my time is now to get a medal. I believe I'll still be around for 2012, but diving's evolved so much," he said. 

American Thomas Finchum, 18, said took much the same diplomatic line at the young Brit by the way: "We stayed consistent...we didn't miss anything. We just didn't hit it to the best of our potential." It seems to be the soundbite of choice when you lose.

The Chinese were always hot favorites to win. They grabbed the lead with their first dive, and never lost it. The real battle was for silver and bronze. The Russian pair was in second place for most of the contest, but Dmitriy Dobroskok wobbled on the fifth dive and entered the water with his legs flipped back. It was a technical error that couldn't be blamed on nerves, he said ruefully afterward. As a result, the German pairing of Patrick Hausding and Sascha Klein scooped Germany's first silver medal of the Games.

It was my first time inside the Water Cube, a magnificent building that glows blue on the outside as light shifts across the giant bubbles that make up its polyurethane surface. Inside, it's smoothly cool, transparent and neutral, unlike the bitter rows going on inside its walls. 

It's not the only place in this giant country where tensions are high but inside the bubble of Olympic politics and sporting rivalry it's hard to remember there are other sources of friction. China is suffering its worst spate of terrorist attacks in years, for instance. State media reported that 10 militants and a security guard died in suicide bombings and a shootout in Kuqa in Xinjiang province in western China on Sunday and "dozens of unexploded bomb devices" were seized.  While the body count suggests the police won this round, a week ago it was the authorities who got hit hardest when 16 border guards died in explosions elsewhere in Xinjiang. The Chinese authorities blame separatists in the largely Muslim region. 

It also emerged over the weekend that Zeng Jinyan, the wife of a jailed dissident, disappeared on the day before the magnificent Olympic Games opening ceremony. The Chinese Human Rights Defenders group says it fears she "has been taken into police custody and might be mistreated." She was under house arrest and her husband Hu Jia is serving a three and a half year jail term for inciting subversion after criticizing China's human rights record in online testimony to the European Parliament.

The Beijing Olympics and their run-up are leaving a lasting impression on many people in the Chinese capital. I've invited some to write guest blogs about the implications of the 2008 Games. This commentary comes from Daniel A. Bell, professor of political theory at Beijing's Tsinghua University, which has long been referred to as China's MIT .  He recently published a book titled China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (Princeton University Press, 2008), and offers these insights into Confucius and the Olympics:

The spectacular fireworks display in the form of giant footsteps leading straight from Tiananmen Square to the new National Stadium at the opening ceremony should dispel any pretense that the Olympics are apolitical. But what exactly was the political message?

Without having seen anything, critics were quick to sharpen their knives. "When the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games begins this week, viewers will be presented with a minutely choreographed spectacle swathed in nationalist kitsch," wrote commentator Nina L. Khruschcheva a few days before Friday's festivities. She went on to lump China with other "totalitarian" regimes like Nazi Germany and predicted that "the world will once again be made to witness a triumph of the totalitarian will". It makes one wonder if we're supposed to expect genocide and world war after the Olympics.

The choice of legendary film director Zhang Yimou as creative director of ceremonies was indeed cause for some concern. Zhang directed the movie Hero which seemed to endorse the brutal and totalitarian ways of the Legalist-inspired first Qin emperor, who buried Confucian scholars alive in his drive to build a unified and powerful state. Zhang seems especially fond of spectacle which dwarfs the individual; he hired more than 10,000 performers for the opening ceremony who came mainly from the army and armed police.

But the Olympics symbolize a change of vision. For most of the twentieth century, China viewed itself as a weak and vulnerable country that has been denied its historical place in the sun. It was bullied by foreign powers and drew upon the Legalist tradition, self-consciously so in the case of Mao, to ruthlessly strengthen the state and mobilize the people for that purpose.

Now that China is more powerful and has begun to reestablish its "deserved" place in the sun, it can relax a bit -- and the traditional ways of Confucian "soft power" can begin to reassert themselves. Here government relies primarily on moral example, rituals, and persuasion to win the "hearts and minds" of the world's peoples. The ideal is a society regulated by care and compassion, where particularistic love begins with the family and is then extended to the nation and the whole world.

It's no coincidence that the glossy "Introduction to China" brochures distributed to 21,000 foreign journalists at the Olympics left out communist party leaders of the past. Instead, they extol Confucius, who is the figurehead of China's new national identity.

The ceremony clearly aimed to celebrate Confucian values rather than send a xenophobic and totalitarian message. Marx and Mao were left out and the themes emphasized openness to the world and its peoples. Children were prominently displayed, including a nine-year-old who helped to rescue victims of the Sichuan earthquake. The diminutive kid walked next to towering basketball player Yao Ming -- to somewhat comic effect -- and other children lent an air of charm and unpredictability to the proceedings.

The Confucian themes were explicit. Such Confucian sayings as "The world's peoples are all brothers" and "Isn't one of life's greatest pleasures to have friends visiting from afar?" were beamed to billions worldwide. Instead of Maoist anti-intellectualism, we had a tribute to the gentle scholarly life as depicted by "the four precious necessities" -- pen, ink, paper, and ink grinder.

And the Confucian-inspired civility campaigns seemed to be paying off. For the past year, Beijingers have been urged to treat foreigners with kindess and civility; spectators to cheer for opposing teams; and winning athletes to treat losers with respect and dignity. At Friday's ceremony, the cheers for the Chinese athletes were relatively restrained, and there were loud cheers for the American and Russian teams -- China's main competition for gold medals.  There may not be too many displays of chauvinistic nationalism at these Olympics.

But perhaps its an unfinished transition to Confucianism? The Chinese ideogram representing "harmony" was prominently displayed. But the famous saying from the Analects of Confucious that "exemplary persons seek harmony but not conformity" seemed to be one of the few missing from the ceremony. Could it be that the government worried about political implications? The contrast between harmony and conformity owes its origin to the ancient text Zuo Zhuan, where it clearly referred to the idea that the ruler should be open to different views among his advisors.  Today, social critics draw on the phrase to argue for more political openness and urge the government to be tolerant of different views. Such themes should be more present the next time the Olympics come to China.

Yao Ming came in to the game saying things no Chinese fan realistically doubted: China didn’t measure up to Team USA; they were just thrilled to play on the same court. To reporters from Houston to Shanghai, Yao uttered variations on the same low-key refrain. “From a technical perspective, we and the U.S. team essentially are not at the same level,” he said. Then thirty seconds after tipoff Yao, NBA stud that he is, squared up self-assuredly and drilled a three-pointer. Up in the rafters of comfy new Wukesong arena, the masses swooned. 3-0, China. A worthy start.

 

Indeed G.W. looked to be having grand time in the stands with Laura, George Sr., and others including USA basketball boss Jerry Colangelo. At the President's right was Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, formerly China's ambassador to the U.S.  Whatever they were gabbing about, the banter was lengthy and lively. Bush gave it up for Yao Ming during the introductions and got an inch or two of elevation off his seat when LeBron James spiked home an alley-oop off the fast break.

The crowd erupted in applause for both countries when the teams made their entrances and sang their respective national anthems. Bush's appearance elicited little noise, but a lot of whispers, head craning and candid camera shots. The U.S. President had been licking his lips over this showdown for some time. A month ago on the sidelines of the G8 Summit in Tokyo, amidst talk about strategic issues like North Korean and Iran, Bush requested tickets to the game from his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao. There was talk that Hu, though not known to be much of hoops follower, might show up as well. Instead the FM Yang was Bush's escort for the night.

In rare press conference with international media before the Olympics, Hu had revealed a penchant for ping-pong.  

In the international, yet very insular Olympic community, news spreads quickly, bad news quicker than good. And the tragic spreads like wildfire. So it was with the news that the in-laws of U.S. men's volleyball coach Hugh McCutcheon had been the victims of a knife attack by a Chinese man at a famous Beijing tourist attraction. Todd Bachman, the coach's father-in-laws was killed and Bachman's wife Barbara  was seriously injured.

The news reached the coaches of the women's fencing team during Saturday's sabre event and they decided not to share it with their athletes and distress them mid-competition. The American women proceeded to pull off a stunning triumph, not only winning America's first gold of the Beijing Olympics, but its first silver and bronze as well.

Women's sabre has been the standout in the U.S. fencing program--the team netted gold and bronze in Athens four years ago--but nobody really anticipated a sweep of the medals. For Mariel Zagunis, it was her second straight Olympic gold medal, for Sada Jacobson a silver to go with her previous bronze, and for 18-year-old Olympic rookie Becca Ward, a heart-stopping bronze with a 15-14 victory over a Russian rival to complete the American romp. "It was awesome with all of us standing up there to hear the national anthem and see three American flags rising" said Zagunis, who dispatched her longtime teammate and close friend Jacobson surprisingly easily, 15-8, in the final match. "We leave it all on the strip," she added. "When you get in you're strictly competitors, when you get off strictly friends."

Jacobson echoed that notion of "friends and teammates", but, as the senior of the medalists at age 25, she was clearly wrestling with disappointment among a host of emotions. When she teared up after the competition, she was nonplussed to find herself accepting a handkerchief from former president George H. W. Bush. "I didn't anticipate that," she said.

It was a day in Beijing that certainly nobody could have anticipated. There is relatively little crime against foreigners in this city. And with the attacker having killed himself by leaping from the 13th century Drum Tower, explanations--as if any are really possible--may come slowly if at all. Nothing can mitigate the tragedy. But amid it, a scrappy band of Amerrican women fencers created a joyous and triumphant moment. Tragedy and triumph, sadly it is a combination the Olympics has experienced before.

The Emperor is a four-month-old, five-star luxury boutique hotel and the first in urban China for the high-end Design Hotels group. Alumni of Qinghua University, China’s “MIT,” formerly housed their club in the building, which sits along the Forbidden City’s east wall in some of Beijing’s most expensive and exclusive real estate. From the rooftop terrace, the panorama view shows outlines of the Great Hall of the People and Mao’s Mausoleum facingTiananmen Square, swooping crenelations along Forbidden City rooftops, and the White Dagoba stupa atop Beihai Park , near the Central Government seat of power, Zhongnanhai. With just a swivel of the head from left to right, a Yin Bar client can take in China’s power centers of today, yesterday and centuries ago, before ordering himself a Jack and Diet Coke where the country’s educational elite once relaxed.

All the guests with whom I spoke were under-whelmed by the Olympic opening night festivities: Beijing’s streets were mostly empty and everything was quiet. One cab driver said it reminded him of Spring Festival, when the entire city shuts down and everyone evacuates the city to visit family in their hometowns. Nicole Graham, a 30-something fromSwitzerland who lives in Beijing , found the city’s atmosphere anything but festive: “there are guards and security everywhere. The atmosphere…it’s like everyone is scared. Where is everyone?” Her friends, German nationals Kirsten Froelich and Caterina Barr who are visitingChina during the Olympics, had hoped for a party, for some “color” and “noise.” Two young British students, Paul Wilson and Matthew Burgess, are on vacation to see their see their friend Lucy Reeve, currently studying Chinese atBeijing’s Capital Normal University. They were “disappointed by this.” They explained, “now, we’re just in a bar. You can be in England at a bar, and it’s like any bar—we wanted something special, something local.”

The irony of seeking out a “real” or “local” party in such an elite location seemed lost on these guests. 

The Chinese people have waited years for the Olympics. So did the lavish Beijing 2008 Opening Ceremony deliver? Five cultural commentators gave me their views: most gave a thumbs up to director Zhang Yimou’s portrayal of China’s ancient culture. However, they were less keen on the scenes of China’s modernized present and promising future which they found tacky or sentimental.

Basically, the opening ceremony was in three parts: a gorgeous series of tableaux covering China’s history and culture; an endless parade of athletes; and the stodgy ceremonials surrounding the Olympic flag and flame.

Part One was a magnificent light show that used hundreds of twirling dancers, switching from red and gold scenes to quieter blue and white ones, from wild drumming to delicate taichi. It acted as condensed guide to China’s history, Confucian culture and famous inventions – paper, printing, fireworks, and the first compasses for navigation. Luckily, I got walked through all of this by an expert, Prof Chen Xia from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

“It’s very beautiful, oh yes, very beautiful,” she murmured. Early scenes showed performers painting on paper by twisting their bodies like dancers. A scroll of lights unrolled itself across in the middle of the stadium, scripting the story like an old Chinese book as the picture on it changed from desert Silk Road to maritime exploits exporting tea and porcelain.

This bit was easy enough for a foreigner to grasp, but the invention of wood block printing, coupled with readings from the philosopher Confucius were tougher going. Prof Chen was so inspired, particularly by the fireworks, that at one point she set out from her home towards the Bird’s Nest for a closer view. Disappointment followed, as the taxi driver told her the roads were blocked off.

I was grateful though that she explained some of the more opaque sequences, such as the link between the scenes of musicians and Confucian beliefs that joyful self-restraint is internalized by playing music. Perfect for encouraging the harmonious society China’s leaders want to see.

Prof Chen’s verdict was mixed though. The history was beautifully done she thought, but “a little hard for foreigners to understand, and even some Beijing people”. More modern-day sequences showing the Bird's Nest, trains, tower blocks and school kids were cloying, with “too many things from the children”, she said.

Victor Yuan, founder of opinion polling company Horizon gave the show 65%, praised the fireworks and loved the writhing dancers who painted with their feet. Overall, though he was “really disappointed” that the show’s magic was limited to the past with “not so much imagination about the future” and critical of Zhang for failing to consult more radical artists. Journalist Yu Ping, who writes about culture and fashion, also dismissed tableaux of modern China showing children and space ships as “too simple”.

So far, three of my commentators had approved the show’s portrayal of China’s ancient culture, but I expected TV anchor Rui Chenggang to be a hard guy to please. He shot to fame after objecting to the presence of Starbucks in the Forbidden City as trampling on Chinese tradition. Did Zhang Yimou’s popularization win his approval? Overall, yes. “It’s appropriate, it’s imaginative”, he said.

While my commentators were mostly watching on TV, philanthropist Hiu Ng was in the Bird’s Nest, and bombarding me with excited text messages. “The atmosphere is unbelievably vibrant”, she yelled when I called her. Ng, co-founder of civic action groups 51SIM.org and 51give, saw the lavish portrayal of the past as packaging a message about the present. China “went through a phase when we were unhappy with our culture” and is now “at peace” with history. As a result, it’s poised to promote its traditional approach of harmony to the wider world, she says. As for the performance, “this is a show that everyone from all over the world can love”.

Ping was waiting to see the Chinese team stride out to test that theory. Chinese Netizens had failed to love their team’s yellow and red outfits, savaging them as a “tomato [and] scrambled egg” look. She’d interviewed the design company Hengyuan Xiang who’d protested that the clothes' vivid colors were meant to enhance the group in a big arena not flatter individuals. To her relief, she found that “if they are walking together they look very wonderful”. Here at least, harmony ruled. But based on my unscientific straw poll few Chinese will have found an enduring image of the future in tonight's events.

From inside the 91,000-seat Bird's Nest stadium, fireworks dazzled and the thunder of 2,008 performers drumming on traditional fou percussion instruments rolled throughout the stadium. High-tech special effects gave even the kitschiest subject matter a startling edge. An ode to China's invention of movable type -ho hum, you might say - morphed into a vast sea of undulating cubic shapes, simulating a giant computer keyboard--and took my breath away. When five-time Olympic medal winner Li Ning prepared to ignite the Olympic flame, invisible wires swooped him skyward for a gravity-defying space-walk around the stadium's rooftop opening. When gymnast Li, who launched a successful sports clothing and accessories empire after snagging three gold medals in Los Angeles, finally lit a gigantic torch perched on the rim of the Bird's Nest, the crowd went wild.

This was China's soft-power version of "shock and ." Or at least, that metaphor ran through my mind as the pyrotechnics reminded me of watching the U.S. "shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad in 2003 from my Palestine Hotel room balcony. Just as Washington's adventure in Iraq today symbolizes the beginning of the decline of U.S. influence around the world - despite its military might - so will China's hosting of these Olympics be seen as a sign that it has arrived as a global power, despite its tarnished human rights record. Nowhere will this tilting balance of power be more pointedly symbolized than in the Olympic medal count, where China may have a better than even chance of snagging the highest number of gold medals, displacing the U.S.

Flanked by the leaders of the United States and Russia - among 80-some other foreign dignitaries--Chinese president Hu Jintao stiffly declared the 2008 Games had begun. Inside he had reason to feel triumphant: one theme hammered (or, more accurately, drummed) into the audience again and again was "harmony," a codeword for Hu's Confucius-influenced call for a "harmonious society." Yet Hu could also be excused for feeling jittery and overwhelmed by today's tsunami of national pride. China has always felt more comfortable in the role of an underdog, as a feisty champion of the developing world, than as a big world power.


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At 6:00PM on Friday, August 8, two hours before the Opening Ceremonies kicked off in Beijing, I braved soul-destroying weather to watch the festivities with flag-waving fans and fan-waving grannies. I'd chosen to view the momentous event at The Place, an enormous shopping center above Beijing's Central Business District (or CBD) that boasts Asia's largest LCD screen, on which, I'd been assured by a customer service representative earlier that very day, I could enjoy Zhang Yimou's carefully-choreographed ode to misguided nostalgia for a bygone era that never existed.

Alas, what a fool I was. This is, after all, Beijing, where very little ever goes according to plan. When I reached The Place, I was told by a remarkably well-informed Olympics volunteer that I would be unable to watch the Opening Ceremonies on Asia's largest LCD screen, which loomed overhead, because Beijing Cable Television (or BCTV) had exclusive rights to broadcast content on the screen, but China Central Television (or CCTV) had exclusive rights to broadcast the Opening Ceremonies, and although a deal had been in the works to resolve the impasse for some time, negotiations had fallen through earlier in the day.

The Opening Ceremonies were still being shown in the nearby Coca-Cola "Shuang Zone" (shuang or 爽 here means "refreshment"), but you needed a ticket to get in, which I neither possessed nor found it in my power to purchase. Thus began the sort of scramble for reliable information that is all too common in Beijing. Several cellphone conversations with friends and colleagues yielded useless rumor and innuendo. Along the way, my girlfriend lost her cellphone (she'd lost her voice the night before, and you can imagine the kind of mood this unfortunate series of events engendered). But finally, fortified by noodles and smiled upon by a higher power, we found out that the Opening Ceremonies were being shown on two huge flatscreen TVs in Ditan Park (Ditan or 地坛 is the Temple of Earth, homely fraternal twin of Tiantan or 天坛, the Temple of Heaven).

And it was awesome. After wading our way through an interminable line, we got seated on the grass with several hundred other spectators from all over the world and watched what proved to be a nice, kinda underwhelming, but still impressive Opening Ceremony. In typical Chinese fashion, the best parts were when thousands of performers were moving simultaneously (they do conformity so well over here -- it's why their synchronized divers are so darn dominant), either banging drums or unrolling scrolls. There was a tense moment around 8:36 when the image on the screens froze for a few seconds, the crowd let out a collective groan, and then the broadcast switched to pre-recorded footage of the torch-lighting in Athens earlier this year.

Speculation ran rampant amongst us expats as to what must have happened: Had a protester disrupted the performance? Had the SAMs near the stadium been deployed? But after about 30 seconds, the broadcast resumed, and none of my colleagues watching the Opening Ceremonies elsewhere even noticed the temporary interruption.

The procession of nations was fascinating. I was surprised by which countries earned large cheers from the crowd, which was predominantly Chinese and otherwise a mix of everything else, kinda like a microcosm of the world's population. Iraq, Cuba, Pakistan, and Timor-Leste (I know, what the heck?), received surprisingly robust rounds of applause. And although I later learned that Taiwan was cheered heartily in the Bird's Nest, they got very little love in the Temple of Earth. Of course, the roar when China appeared after Zambia was deafening. It warmed the heart to see so much unabashed national pride. On the cab ride back to our Bureau to write this post, I heard Hu Jintao officially open the Games. And when I got back here, my colleague Mary Hennock was watching the torch-lighting on TV. By then it was after midnight, and I'd survived to tell the tale.
 

Many people believe that Olympic Opening Ceremonies are essentially the equivalent of Mardi Gras or The Rose Bowl Parade--with, of course, the addition of athletes in cool or very uncool national uniforms. But Opening Ceremonies are far different, far more complex affairs. Indeed each is a sophisticated and and nuanced traversal of a proud nation's history, culture and myth. Prospective viewers of this performance can really use a guiding hand from somebody well versed in all those aspects of China.

Unfortunately, that person couldn't score a ticket and I did. So I will be delivering Opening Ceremonies play-by-play in the hopes of clarifying this affair for you. While I may not be an expert, I am not ill-equipped to the task. My father took me out for my first authentic Chinese meal when i was just five years old (egg rolls, chop suey, sweet and sour pork, shrimp in lobster sauce and fried rice). I took a course in Chinese history in college 40 years ago (admittedly I got my only collegiate 'C' because I somehow got Sun Yat-sen mixed up in the Ming dynasty), I saw "The Last Emperor" (twice!) and, despite being from Boston, thought "Infernal Affairs" with Tony Leung was a far superior movie to the Martin Scorcese knockoff, "The Departed" with Jack Nicholson.

So follow along with me and we will enjoy this Chinese spectacular, three years in the making, together--and with a level of sophistication that most viewers won't even approach.

The ID of the final torchbearer is supposed to be a well-guarded secret. So it might look odd that in China of all places the official news wire seems to be tipping its hand just hours ahead of time:

"Chinese legendary gymnast to light Olympic flame?

    "BEIJING, Aug. 8 (Xinhua) -- The hot tip on who will light the Olympic flame at the Olympic Games opening ceremony tonight is gymnastics legend Li Ning.

    "As sports stars Liu Xiang and Yao Ming appeared out of the possible candidate list, Li has been considered a prime choice to light the cauldron at the National Stadium, or the Bird's Nest.

    "Lighting the cauldron with the flame from Olympia is an immense honour and the most symbolic act of the ceremony.

    "The final torch bearer should be able to represent the image of China, communicate with the world, display the Olympic spirit, and be fully recognized by the public, Feng Jianzhong, deputy head of the General Administration of Sport, has said.

    "Li, 45, won three gold medals, two silver and one bronze in gymnastics at the 1984 Olympics. Known as China's gymnastics prince, he has been garlanded with success. And nowadays, he is a successful businessman with his own sports goods company."

Xinhua came out with the above item over its English wire at a little after three o’clock p.m. Beijing time today. There did not appear to be a corresponding report in Chinese.>

We shall see whether Xinhua spoke too soon or not. But clearly this matter is being treated as a sports secret, rather than a political one. Xinhua, among many others, has been speculating a lot in recent days. Already, the roster of torchbearers posted on web site of the State General Administration of Sport had hinted that Li would be among the last at the Bird's Nest tonight.

Li served his country proudly, then went on to build a lucrative brand out of it. Who better to represent the 'New Beijing'?

President Bush has flown into Beijing to attend the Olympics opening ceremony Friday night. However, his first duty call was to open the new US embassy at 8.08 AM on Aug 8, mirroring the Games ceremonial start time of 8.08 PM on the same day. The gesture was "a nice tip of the hat" to China, says one US businessman invited to the dedication ceremony.

How far to tip the hat to China has been a tricky issue for the outgoing US president in recent days. He has garnered headlines by sprinkling his farewell mini-tour of East Asia with critical remarks about China’s human rights record. Yet he has made clear for months he won’t be repeating those comments publicly once he arrives on Chinese soil. Face-to-face chats with China’s leaders are more productive, he says. The new embassy’s muted colour scheme aims for a similar concept: "It’s...sophisticated and serious in keeping with the level of diplomacy”, State Department architect Jay Holleran who oversaw the project with designers Skidmore, Owings and Merrill told journalists during an open house tour on Tuesday.

As the embassy opening got underway, Reporters Without Borders tipped its hat in the other direction with an illegal radio broadcast in support of free speech. The 20-minute show went out in Beijing at 8.08 AM on the 104.4 FM frequency and contained interviews with an exiled journalist and other dissidents to highlight the “dozens and dozens of journalists and internet users in prison” in China, said RWB general secretary Robert Ménard who anchored it. The show used mini transmitters and antennae and is posted on RWB’s website. (The White House press corps accompanying the president had their own run-in with China's control-meisters; authorities kept them waiting for hours on the tarmac, until around dawn, to sort through red tape and "procedures" for disembarking).

The political juggling at the heart of diplomacy is embodied in the design elsewhere in the embassy compound. The central tower appears to be a glass-fronted office block. Not lack of imagination, but a deliberate "architectural statement about clarity", Bill Prior of the State Department's overseas buildings bureau told me Tuesday. But take a second look, because the real wall of the main building sits a few feet behind the glass curtain. It’s actually a concrete fortress pierced by small, oblong windows, like a gun turret. Transparency can be a tricky thing for diplomats and their governments.

And so it is with the White House dance over human rights in the last few days. Bush hosted five exiled dissidents (but no Tibetans) at the White House last week, and in Bangkok spoke of America’s  “firm opposition” to China's suppression of human rights and religious freedom. This drew an equally ritualistic response from China’s Foreign Ministry; it condemned “any words or acts that interfere in other countries' internal affairs”. Hard to tell where the windows and walls are here too.

Both President Bush and his father will attend this evening’s Olympic Games opening ceremony in the Bird’s Nest stadium. In 1989, Bush Senior faced calls for boycotts and sanctions against China far more intense than anything his son has skated around in the months since the Lhasa riots. The elder Bush mostly ignored them, amid criticisms of toadying to commercial interests that every US president has faced since. But China prospered, opening the way to WTO entry accords (finally clinched by President Bill Clinton) that transformed the relationship into mutual economic dependency. Bush senior’s 1989 stance makes him arguably the most influential American president in shaping modern US-China ties. I'm pondering these uncomfortable truths: without his indifference to the human rights lobby China today might much poorer.

Next year marks 30 years of US-China diplomatic relations since Washington switched its embassy from Taipei to Beijing in 1979. Bush is leaving office with the US’ reputation weaker than at any time since WWII, its soft power sapped by its adventures in Iraq, its economy in distress back home. His legacy for US-China relations may prove as lasting as his father’s, but in a wholly different direction. China’s rise may be over-hyped but it’s real and there’s more space for it than previously as the US depends on the partnership much too heavily to offend.

Finally, it’s a shame that embassies are seldom open to the public because this is a fine building. It’s a fortress, of course. There’s a moat in front of the visa office, the gravel paths all double up as fire truck access roads, and the coyly-named dragon wall is a windowless band of black stone two stories high along the base of the building. But it’s also home to a stunning collection of modern Chinese and American art – and red lobby chairs in different heights and sizes that’ll make the place a paradise for behavioral psychologists.

I got my 15 seconds of fame--and took one helluva pounding for the privilege. At Kobe Bryant's press availability, your intrepid Newsweek correspondent, though remarkably slow afoot, somehow maneuvered into a prime position right right behind the superstar and directly in front of the cameras.

But if American media has a reputation for being somewhat rude, we're wimps compared to the foreign press with its willingness to push, shove, trip and do whatever it takes to get cameras/telephones/tape recorders near their target--in this case the Los Angeles Lakers superstar.The result was a beating, the likes of which I haven't experienced since I was a 16-year-old at a one-day basketball camp and the man covering me in a pickup game was the Boston Celtics's power forward Jim Loscutoff, a man who earned his nickname "Jungle Jim" every time out.

Bryant described his Olympic experience as "a kid in a candy store," adding, "I love everything." But when pressed on whether "everything" included the scrum crashing around him, he conceded, "This I could do without. I guess it's a necessary evil." It quickly got even eviler as local volunteers stripped off their shirts, begging Kobe to autograph them and even some reporters joined in, shoving their notebooks and other paraphernalia forward trying to cadge a Kobe souvenir.

Amid the hysteria surrounding him, Kobe did actually get a chance to talk--about both basketball and human rights in China. He passed rather than shoot on the latter, insisting that it was the domain of President Bush who had arrived in Beijing a few hours earlier. "We stay in our lane," he said. "You want to talk about screen and roll or alley-oops, we answer that. I don't think President Bush is skilled to answer that." The famous duo, the president and Kobe, may cross paths at the team's opening game Sunday night against China. Bryant said that when he heard the president would be cheering the team on, he thought, "Damn! Pretty cool."

The foreign press has dubbed the U.S. squad not the "Dream Team," but the "Redeem Team" after a bronze at the Athens Olympics and third and sixth-place finishes at the last two world championships. And Bryant was appropriately respectful of the opposition in explaining the unexpected turn in American basketball fortunes. "Other countries have all-stars too," he said, " and they've been playing better basketball than us." When the Chinese clamored to hear what he expected from Yao Ming, he said, "Same thing that happens when we face him in the NBA--20 points, 20 rebounds and he'll be a handful."

While Bryant said he didn't believe the Americans deserved to be favored over teams like Argentina, the last Olympic old medalist, Spain, the last world champion and Greece, the team that beat the U.S. in the semis of the 2007 worlds, he left little doubt that he was confident that redemption would be theirs. "We're certainly expecting to win the gold. That's the goal. That's why we're here." Asked what would happen if the team were to lose again, he said, "If we want to return U.S. citizens, we've got to win gold. Then Bryant, who spent part of his childhood in Italy, added that anything less than a gold medal and "I'll be Italian. You'll call me Kobe Giovanni."

Bryant insisted there was no great secret as to what it would take to make this and his teammates' Olympic dream come true: "Defense and rebounding. No matter whether you're playing in Beijing, at home in the NBA or on Mars, defense and rebounding wins games."

(P.S. I'm the guy standing right behind Kobe. And it's safe to look because I kept my shirt on.)

It's showtime as Olympic athletes and tourists stream into Beijing. For those of us who've waited months for the Olympics amid construction dust and growing traffic congestion, the rewards are now here. Tuesday brought my first Olympic perk, and it was fabulous.

But it didn't start out well. A sudden late afternoon text message telling me of an International Olympic Committee (IOC) press conference sent me scurrying to the Olympic Green. It was peak rush hour and after 30 minutes hunting for a taxi in the snarl-up near Newsweek's bureau I was ready to abandon the idea as it seemed impossible to get there in time. Then an empty cab appeared. The driver—more switched on to the possibilities than I was—demanded to see my Olympic press pass.

Soon we were waving it at policemen and hitting Beijing's Second Ring Road at 100 kilometers an hour (63 mph). Driving in Beijing is normally not fun. It's frustrating. Anyone who enjoys driving—especially driving fast—should avoid a Beijing traffic jam. But on Tuesday evening the Torch came back to Beijing and Second Ring Road—one of Beijing's most congested roads at any time of day—was cleared to greet it.

We raced round policemen, almost taking their legs off at the knee, but they cheerfully waved us on. OK, I know the buzz I felt was anti-social, and ecologically unsound. Others suffered as Second Ring Road's usual heavy traffic was crammed into service lanes and bike lanes to make way for us. Just south of the Bird's Nest stadium we too became small fry, forced to the roadside by a stream of black Audis and SUVs heading towards the stadium, carrying officials to watch Opening Ceremony final rehearsals. But a 30 minute journey took just 12, and for those 12 thrilling minutes I got to see life through their eyes.

In recent years, when America has shown its face to the world, it hasn't always been very attractive or indeed very well received. The country seems to have lost a step or...maybe even three when it comes to the kind of symbolism with which it once dazzled the planet.

But this week in Beijing, the U.S. Olympic team demonstrated impeccable judgment with a remarkable gesture, a symbol of the very best of the United States. For an honor usually reserved for a longtime and accomplished American Olympian, it named Lopez Lomong, a first-time, 23-year-old Olympian and likely also-ran in the 1,500 meters here, as the U.S. flagbearer for Opening Ceremonies. "I'm here as an ambassador of my country and I will do everything I can to represent my country well," Lomong said after he was told of the team selection.

That honor caps a remarkable odyssey for Lomong, who came to the United States as one of the so-called "Lost Boys of Sudan." As a six-year-old, he was kidnapped by rebel forces and thrust into that East African nation's seemingly eternal civil war. He somehow managed to escape and spent a decade in a Kenyan refugee camp. He recalls hiking five miles and paying a few cents to watch the Sydney Olympics on a black-and-white TV run off a car batter. It was then he began sketching—but not really believing—his own Olympic dream.

In 2001, he left a world of hoplessness for one of hope in America. He landed with a foster family in upstate New York and later became a top collegiate distance runner at Northern Arizona University, winning NCAA titles at 1,500 and 3,000 meters. And at the U.S. Olympic Trials earlier this summer, Lomong, who became a citizen last year, just squeezed onto the American team, finishing third in the 1,500 despite a gimpy ankle.

That entire 1,500 team is a snapshot of "melting pot" America and, in an era where anti-immigration sentiment resonates loudly, the fulfillment of the classic American dream. Besides Lomong, the U.S. 1,500 team includes Bernard Lagat, the reigning world champ and a native Kenyan, and Leonel Manzano, whose family crossed the border from Mexico to Texas when he was four years old. "The American flag means everything in my life," said Lomong. "I don't even have words to describe how happy I am."

So should be all those who hoped that President Bush and Olympians might speak out or make some gesture to call attention to the Chinese role in the Sudanese tragedy of Darfur. Lomong is a most powerful symbol of both tragedy in Sudan and hope in America.

Today I decamped at dawn to watch the torch relay in you-know-which-famous-square. A couple dozen other journalists and I were herded to a spot facing Mao’s portrait. We waited and waited. The last time I’d waited that long in that place, that early in the morning, was in 1989 during a brief and ill-fated Beijing Spring.

Waiting for Yao Ming and the torch relay

Back then I was waiting for Chinese police to come clear the square of hundreds of youthful protesters who’d hung colorful silk banners off official flagpoles in front of the granite obelisk known as the Monument to the People’s Heroes. (Chinese look down on your political movement if you don’t have flags made of luxuriant silk, and if you don’t

 
Aritz Parra/AP

The first skirmishes in the guerrilla war between Chinese authorities and human rights protesters took place on Wednesday. Plenty of what China doesn't want to happen has happened here today, but so far it's been small-scale, with a scrappy, subterranean feel, and very little of it has occurred in public. By the end of the afternoon, four Free Tibet protesters had been detained and a film show was canceled. Human rights groups staged at least four protests.

The day's most successful stunt came from Students for a Free Tibet. Two men--American Phil Bartell and Briton Iain Thom--climbed pylons near the showcase Bird's Nest National Stadium at dawn and hung out banners saying "Tibet will be Free" and "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet". Police detained the climbers and their two helpers–one man and one woman–who were acting as spotters at the base of the pylon, and there has been no word of them since. It's likely they've been deported. Despite the small scale of this incident, the stadium is the icon of the Games and will be the site of the opening ceremony on Friday. It's blow to the police for activists to get so close so such a sensitive site.

Free Tibet activists also organized film showings in hotel rooms, notifying reporters by text message. The first show went ahead, attended by Reuters and BBC reporters, but Newsweek's invitation was to the later event in a second hotel. There was a distinctly amateur feel to this occasion as two dozen reporters milled round the lobby of the modest Hotel G (no secrecy here, that's its full name) in east Beijing, trying to gain entry to Room 612. While management insisted that 612's occupant did not want us admitted, reporters dialed the room and were told to come up. After a while, though, Room 612 stopped answering. Seven journalists who did make it inside appeared and said that management had switched off the TV and ordered them out. The UK-based organizers included Dechen Pemba, a Tibetan woman with a British passport who was deported from Beijing in July. Before the film, Pemba gave a 10 minute introduction by video, Reuters reported.

Hotel rooms were a creative theme of the day. If the film show was art-house, the day's third event was more like an art school degree show installation. Selected reporters were invited to go to two hotel rooms a couple of miles apart, locate the room key taped to the back of the "Do not disturb" sign and let themselves inside for a private viewing. What they found, according to a photographer with the Spanish paper El Mundo, were walls daubed with slogans and a life-size black-clad figure laid out on the bed with a splash of red paint at its neck. Daubed directly onto the walls was the slogan "Speak out for those who have no voices", the Beijing 2008 logo and the names of five jailed dissidents. The names in both rooms were the same: AIDS activist Hu Jia, Pastor Zhang Rongliang who supports unregistered churches or "house churches", journalist Shi Tao, human rights activist and lawyer Guo Feixiong, and Falungong member Xu Na. There was no sign of the organizers (who presumably paid cash for their rooms) according to Richard Spencer of the UK-based newspaper The Daily Telegraph. It's not clear who organized these spectacles.

These guerrilla actions are small scale affairs, but the Games haven't started yet. There almost certainly will be more protests in the days ahead.

The Hotel G was shut down after this incident, according to an email from the film show's organizers. "According to many sources the guests of Hotel G. were forced to leave their hotel and find other places for the coming night," it said.

Ning Ning, a 26-year-old from Urumqi who moved to Beijing for a Master's painting program at Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts, is excited. The city's newly opened Line 10 subway brings other parts of the city closer to her, faster, than ever before: “I just want to ride around and explore with my friends!” Generally considered a private city whose hulking outer shell is tough to penetrate, the expanded underground—which opened Saturday, July 19—is making China's capital more accessible and, yes, possibly more democratic in the one area of public administration that touches virtually every resident nearly every day: transportation.

The varied territory covered by Line 10—a 25-kilometer, 22-station long inverted ‘L’ shaped route that traces the East Third Ring Road north-south and then tacks east-west—is a crash course in understanding Beijing as a city. The train travels from the ancient universe of Panjiayuan market's old-world curios in the city’s southeast to the Haidian hangouts of youth and high-tech in the far northwest—with the Central Business District (CBD), Embassy compounds, and Sanlitun entertainment quarter in between.

Formerly a 90-minute car ride (even when traffic is light), the journey can now be covered in under 40 minutes. It was launched as part of a progressive transportation package in time for the Olympics which also boasts the Airport Express elevated train and the 4-stop Olympic Park line. Moving around the city during the Games has been transformed further by anti-pollution measures that include alternating driving days for even and odd numbered car license plates and banning industrial vehicles that don't meet emissions standards.

For Ning Ning and friends, wandering about the city just for curiosity's sake “in the past was just too far, wasted so much time.” Ning Ning also fretted that “we wouldn’t know how to get back home,” which is something many in Beijing feel. Here, citizens must contend with street names constantly under revision, new thoroughfares that sprout up in just weeks, and whole neighborhoods disappearing in the time it takes one to return from a business trip. “In order to get around,” explained Annie, a 30-something administrative assistant who traveled from her office in the CBD to the Haidian Hospital in the technology hub of Zhongguancun, “you had to spend time figuring out what combination of buses and taxis to take to get around. Now, it will be much easier.”

Opaque is one way to describe travel through Beijing transport. Michael Armstrong, an American who writes a bi-weekly local column focusing on the expatriate experience and who has lived in Beijing for three years, thinks of the Chinese capital “as a bunch of little villages—and people just stay within their own townships.” The center of town is circumscribed by the circular subway Line 2, and Line 1 traces east-west artery Chang’an Avenue; Line 5 travels north-south through this central area. With the launch of line 10, those not living along one of these main thoroughfares can now connect with the sites and neighborhoods that made Beijing famous.

Three days before the Olympic swimming competition begins in Beijing, the top stars of the American team were out and about, dutifully fulfilling their media responsibilities. Michael Phelps was talking about his preparations, but not about the challenge of surpassing Mark Spitz's record of eight gold medals in a single Olympics. ("You are the guys who are talking about it, I haven't said anything about breaking any record.) Dara Torres, the 41-year-old "Supermom" swimming in her fifth Olympic Games, talked about becoming a hero to the 40-something set. And Amanda Beard, the next oldest member of the women's team at 26, talked about why she felt compelled to disrobe for he cameras again--this time for PETA's anti-fur crusade.

But it was 24-year-old Eric Shanteau who commanded the most attention. Under other circumstances, Shanteau, a runner-up in the 200-meter breast stroke at the U.S. Olympic Trials, would have been a bit player in the pool scene, unlikely to command a microphone let alone a crowd of reporters hanging on his every word. However, Shanteau revealed after the Trials that he had been diagnosed with testicular cancer and that he had decided to postpone surgery in pursuit of his Olympic dream.

Shanteau doesn't pretend that it was a simple decision--in July he described learning of his diagnosis as a "huge bomb"--and says that while his teammates are overwhelmed by his positive attitude and upbeat demeanor, it isn't as simple as all that. "It's been a rollercoaster ride," he said. "This isn't the flu, this is cancer." And he wrestles with the burden all the time. "It's on my mind constantly. I can't help that." Still, he says, he is confident that "I will be cured, I will beat this."

In a strange way, Shanteau says, the disease has taken some of the pressure off him in this Olympics. "I've kind of got an out in cancer," he says. "It keeps things in perspective for me, There are a lot more important things in life than an Olympic Games."

Brendan Hansen, a fellow breastroker and one of the team captains, says that for the team watching Eric deal with cancer makes dealing with the Olympics seem a lot smaller and perhaps easier. "What we're doing here is not on as big a pedastal as we put it," he said. It is a perspective that may be hard to maintain amid all the hoopla here in Beijing. But today it wasn't lost on anybody who heard Shanteau.

Hundred-meter world record holder Usain Bolt entered a news conference today only 80 percent sure he’d take a stab at a “double” in the 100 and 200-meter dashes. He emerged 100 percent sure.

Bolt’s prospects of a “double” in the two events, last accomplished by Carl Lewis in Los Angeles in 1984, has become one of the hot storylines of the Beijing Games. The 21-year-old Jamaican was already the favorite for gold in the 200 meters, his forte. He darted into the thick of 100-meter contention with sprints of 9.76 and 9.72 in May, the latter time nipping compatriot Asafa Powell’s previous mark of 9.74.

The Bolt camp had said all along that his coach Glenn Mills would decide whether or not he’d go for the “double”, which has the downside of added training and racing and potentially harming his chances in the 200. On Sunday, the AP confirmed through Bolt’s agent that he would compete in both events.

But apparently no one told Bolt that. At the start of a Q&A with media in Beijing on Tuesday organized by Jamaican team sponsors Puma, Bolt said he was 80 percent sure he’d run in both races. “Actually my coach hasn’t really told me exactly, but I’m just guessing eighty.” Then a reporter informed Bolt of Sunday’s reports, to which he responded: “This is first time I’m hearing that, actually.” Bolt recovered swiftly and good-naturedly. He said he’d never had any such miscommunication before with Mills, whom he praised as a “father figure”. By the end of the news conference was switching gears with a grin. “I thought I was 80 percent sure I was going to double, but now I’m 100 percent sure I’m going to double.”

Nor did Beijing’s infamous smog and oppressive August humidity appear to factor in the decision. Bolt said he’s been training in a camp far outside the capital (in Tianjin, he thought) so hadn’t had a chance to assess the ill-reputed air himself. But he showed no concerns about the conditions compounding the physical challenge of the “double”. He had prepared for it by running the 100 and 200 meters at meets over the course of this season, and had learned to run easy in trial heats, he noted. “So we’ve conditioned myself pretty much for this, so I’m kind of used to the heat, so I don’t think it’s going to take too much out of me.”

Unfortunately, the best laid plans of...mice and mousy men. It was hard to hit the ground with the song in my heart since I couldn't even see the ground here in China through the gray haze until we were just about down on the ground, thus depriving me of the view of the spectacular airport that I had so coveted. The compensating shine was the relentless smiles of the Chinese hosts, who cloaked me in a cocoon of friendliness and efficiency from the second I stepped inside the terminal.

This insular world of the Olympic family had me speeding through the massive airport and all manner of other obstacles and ensconced in my hotel room within two hours of landing. The hotel, perfectly nice if you don't mind sheetrock for a bed, captures in its name all the mystery and romance of China not to mention some of the eroticism of modern Chinese film: Meet me at the Foreign Experts Building. Okay, it sounds like a place better suited for a symposium than a rendezvous.

Dinner was something of a parody in which I ordered duck, waited 15 minutes only to be told to try again, then--same thing. The beer came fast, though. I settled for a somewhat Westernized hot and sour soup and sauteed eggplant, quite excellent and probably a safer first -night choice anyway. Exhausted after 17 hours of travel, I couldn't be deterred by an extra-firm bed and slept beautifully for all of three hours, somewhat less than the nine I had penciled in my schedule.

But my problems didn't amount to a hill of beans compared to those of the Olympic Committee's because morning--Opening Ceremonies minus three days now--showed the haze still smothering the city. And pretty soon the whole world will be watching and it is not a pretty sight. The fireworks and other spectacles of Friday night's Opening Ceremonies would probably not be affected too much by the smog. But there is a worse threat: rain, which could clear the smog while smothering the fireworks. And Saturday's Olympic program features the long cycling road races--my friend, George Vecsey of the New York Times labeled the cyclists the "canaries in the mine"--as they could be the first athletes to brave the smog at great distance.

I came here rooting for the Chinese to pull this off, but so far I don't seem to be helping one bit.

This morning’s attack, which killed 16 police in the far western region of Xinjiang, did not exactly surprise me, but it may have startled at least one senior official from the area, Kerexi Maihesuti. Just last Friday in a Beijing press conference for foreign media the vice chairman of the Xinjiang region described the threat of ethnic Uighur separatists there as a disorderly band of wanna-be’s “with limited power” who are “not competent make the attacks which some hostile forces wish".

      Are authorities dangerously downplaying the threat? Well, not always. A People’s Daily editorial last month warned grimly that “The Beijing Olympics is facing a terrorist threat unsurpassed