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 walked. 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.

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.

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.