The post-Olympic void

BEIJING -- The OIympic Green returned to being a vast, desolate space Monday.

All the security fencing remained in place, limiting access to accredited people -- media clearing out of the Main Press Center, Olympic organizing committee staff and volunteers.

There weren't many of those people out and about as I walked around many of the venues, giving myself a final look.

In fact, there was so little human or vehicle noise that an odd call and antiphon resonated across great distances:  the hum of cicadas, answered by the beep-beep-beep signals for the visually impaired at traffic lights.

While the volunteers remained as resolutely helpful and friendly as they had been during the Olympics, there was backsliding in other areas.

One worker openly defied the anti-spitting campaign Beijing had run for a year, and cigarette butts lay on the ground.

The place briefly will come back to life when the Paralympic Games begin their 12-day run on Sept. 6, and the exterior surface of the Water Cube still glowed with its changing color scheme Monday night.

But the Bird's Nest no longer shone red as it had when its interior walls were bathed in light.  The cauldron holding the Olympic flame was snuffed out Sunday, and the building was a looming, grayish hulk.

It was as if the energy that filled it for two ceremonies and nine days of track and field rather than electricity had been the light source.

That energy is gone forever.

-- Philip Hersh

Photo:  A worker takes a nap at the Bird's Nest, with the Olympic flame caldron in the background, a day after the closing ceremony for the Beijing Olympics. Credit: Ng Han Guan / Associated Press

Comments

[Frank]

Immediately after the closing ceremony, I am glad to see the release of eight fellow American back home. Their motives are understandable. I think they can acheive more by going to Tibet and personally appreciate the hardness of the Tibetian to reflect their voices in a more touching and realistic manner. On the other hand, they have missed out the true spirit of the Games which IOC knew what was happening and that was exactly why Beijing was chosen for the Games in 2008. Changes might not be eminent especailly on cultural issues. Give it time and might. Welcome home !

[Steve Rose]

The 8 American citizens went to China with one clear goal: violate chinese laws and get them arrested. And they succeeded. Maybe NED will pick up the return air fare and maybe a few extra dollars. How cool is that.

Do you really think they care about Tibet people by supporting the ruthless ruler of Dalai Lama? It is more like a fashionable movement nowadays to bash china.

Dalai is the worst dictator and suppressor of religious freedom, let the Tibetans tell the truth. http://www.westernshugdensociety.org/

[The Real Steve Rose]

I see that the Chinese propaganda agents have learned to use Americanized names to spread dogma about Tibet.

China lied about its commitment to uphold freedom of speech during the games. It lied about removing censorship...it didn't even do so for foreigners. It lied about so many things during the games. Hell, it even lied about its athletes so that it could win a few more medals.

The great message of these games is that China lies. And that's what history will remember.

[Jeanette]

I do not want to belittle any of the events, but I was heartbroken that more time was given to U Bolt, than to our decathlon winner. He was from the USA, for goodness sake.
The decathlon is an athletic event consisting of ten track and field events
Bryan Clay had TEN events; that's more than Usain Bolt entered. What's wrong with this picture!!! I think we should give him more credit. I'm a little disappointed that NBC did not capitalize on this.
I was truly proud of our athletes. However, one thing about some of them bothered me. When our National Anthem was played. I believe they should have their hand cross their hearts. Also, it would be nice if they would sing it! I was proud when our basketball players were proud enough to do so! After all, they are representing America.
NBC and the other channels did provide quite a bit of coverage and it was quite some feat. I was also interested in seeing the countries that didn’t place. It would also show how hard our athletes had to work to gain top spots.

[Stephen Dolle]

I like most Americans was not able to attend the Beijing Olympics, and thus was relegated to what I can see and read thru the broadcasts and on-line. Outside of the American couple who were attacked in the early going, "foreign" demonstrators who were arrested, and the opening ceremony singer who didn't actually sing (like American music videos do too), most everything else was extraordinary.

Many of the works by American media are strange. They spend weeks writing about the gloom and doom scenarios before the Olympic games, give Beijing and the games the highest of marks during the actual games, and then quickly revert to tearing apart the games and Chinese government. Did the facts on the ground change so quickly? Where were you and your writing before the U.S. invaded Iraq? This type of reporting is somewhere between juvenile and incompetant.

When you consider where China was 10 and 15 years ago, their progress and the successes of these games is one of the all time great achievements of the past several hundred years. Yes, we all know the struggles surrounding Tibet. But by comparison, it took the U.S. some 100 years after the abolition of slavery to give black Americans equal rights. And today, our prisons are filled with blacks and our major cities over-run with gangs and drug abuse. Where are the demonstrations about these failures?

The truth is the Beijing games and its participants pulled off an event of "historic" proportions. We will be seeing the economic, technological, sports, and foreign policy benefits of these games for years to come. I would be a conservative value on these games in the trillions of dollars. The only other Olympics in this class of value/benefit were the 1984 games in Los Angeles that spurred new trends in sports and sports business, and I believe in a few years we will come to know a much greater level of value/benefit and goodwill than those games.

Philip Hersh of the Times writes how great the experience was, and ends with,

"That energy is gone forever."

I beg to differ, Mr. Hersh. Every participant and viewer around the world who took in, read about, or viewed these games will carry that evergy with them for a lifetime. It is up to each and everyone of us to keep it "burning," just as the Olympic torch was for all those weeks. Perhaps from here on out, we should always keep a flame buring - to signal our committment to this cause.

[I Can't Sing...]

If I were a gold medalist, I would be singing along loudly (if poorly). Does our anthem sound any better than it does at the Olympics?

[Mao]

As a person who lives in China and indeed attended many Olympic events including the closing ceremony, I feel confident that that these Olympics were not one of the "great achievements of the past several hundred years." Good lord, Stephen Dolle, can we cut the hyperbole just a bit?

I too think the media often did not paint an accurate picture, but not for the reasons people have suggested. The general meme put out by the media has been that the Olympics were a logistical triumph but a spiritual failure. I tend to agree with the latter. The Chinese government is not fond of large groups of people gathering and so these Olympics lacked the international parties and gatherings present in other Olympics. It gave these games even more of a corporate feel (which one might have thought impossible) and I can't say that there were great opportunities to interact with people from other nations (save China, of course) in a spirit of community.

Then there are all the broken promises. Whatever you may think of the commitments China made in exchange for the privilege of hosting these Olympics -- I happen to think they were reasonable given the values enshrined by the Olympic charter -- they did make those commitments and then brazenly violated them, rendering their commitments and the Olympic charter a joke. It's a privilege to host the Olympics, not a right.

In terms of the logistics, these Olympics were a mixed bag and this is where I think the typical media meme has gone astray. On the one hand, the events started on time, moved efficiently and there were no significant errors of which I was aware (in gymnastics alone, there were problems in Sydney with the womens' vault height being set too low and then in Athens there was the scoring issue on the men's side). So I would tend to agree that the events themselves were generally well run.

On the other hand, any laobaixing will tell you that transportation was a complete nightmare. I suspect the media didn't pick up on this because BOCOG set up a taxi pool at the media center for media members. If you weren't a party cadre, VIP or media member, however, you were SOL. Taxis were impossible to find, especially at the event sites away from the Olympic Green. The public bus pool set up at the Olympic Green was disorganized. Indeed, the most striking memory I have of those buses was the enormous amount of volunteer labor at the scene and the utter lack of problem solving ability to get people to line up and run the buses through efficiently (the Chinese government failed in its campaign to educate the Chinese public in the fine art of forming queues and lines; this could also be witnessed at the Olympic Green intake point). Instead, buses for the various routes came through randomly with throngs of Chinese people trampling each other to get on the buses, which then ended up overloaded. It was miserable and the media completely missed out on it.

There was much that I enjoyed about the Olympics. As I said, the events themselves moved through efficiently. But these Olympics were also marked by serious problems, some of them associated with bad behavior on the part of the government, some of them associated with the combination of authoritarianism and corporatism and yes, some associated with significant logistical problems.

[Stephen Dolle]

Mao,

I think I can say I am like most Olympic viewers, I got the general overview of the games and the country, and wasn't on the ground like you to see so much specific details and failures that you write about. But, to be honest, I had low expectations, so was pleasantly surprised. Of course, it was the athletes stories and accomplishments this year that made the Olympics

Mao, like you, I also have my concerns about the "corporatization" of China and Wall Street's love affair with the same. But - the question we have to ask ourselves is, "Did the Bejing Olympics help to bring conditions in China any closer, the same, or further apart from where most would like them to be today?"

Mao wrote:

As a person who lives in China and indeed attended many Olympic events including the closing ceremony, I feel confident that that these Olympics were not one of the "great achievements of the past several hundred years." Good lord, Stephen Dolle, can we cut the hyperbole just a bit?