First-hand view of reporting the Olympics
Mark Sappenfield | 08.25.08
It is 2:30 a.m. I have no idea what day it is. The men’s 200-meter dash finished a few hours ago. One measures time by events here, not by days or hours.
I am walking back from the Bird’s Nest in a light drizzle, thinking that, for journalists, the Olympics are nearly as much about these moments – in the wee hours of the night, story freshly finished – as they are about the actual events. The Olympics seem mine now, personal. Other than a Russian TV crew doing a daily wrap-up in front of the glowing red spaceship of the Bird’s Nest, I am alone.
Or so I thought.
Without warning, four Chinese volunteers appear from nowhere in some sort of über golf cart, as if a normal cart woke up one day and became a Cadillac Escalade. They are offering me a ride back to the Main Press Center.
Read the rest of my tale here:
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Beijing’s final bow
Mark Sappenfield | 08.24.08
Closing ceremonies are, traditionally, the moment when the Olympics let their hair down. Before tonight, it was not entirely clear that Beijing was capable of such a thing. If ever there has been a hair-up, button-down Olympics, it has been here.
That is not a bad thing, mind. You don’t have every single venue ready weeks before the Olympics with a “let’s party” sort of attitude. But volunteers’ affability notwithstanding, the Beijing Olympics have sometimes given the impression of Games managed with gritted teeth and an iron fist.
Where Athens was all ease and ouzo – and was a perfectly pleasant Olympics – Beijing has achieved by raw determination an Olympics the likes of which the world had never seen, both in scope and efficiency.
Yet if the opening ceremonies were intended to make this plain to all of us (which they did, emphatically), the closing ceremonies showed another side of China.
There was still that strain of the epic, in writhing, shiny suited men tethered to some steel tower of Babel. But as much as the opening ceremonies were masculine and martial in tone, the closing ceremonies were feminine and – dare we say it – fun-loving.
Beijing, it seems, can also throw a fairly decent party.
Many of the motifs remained – massive, never-ceasing movement, suits that lighted up like Christmas trees in the dark, and a near pathological desire to make anything not bolted to the floor fly. But there was no program here – no agenda to show the world the “real” China. It was less a statement than Cirque du Soleil, writ gigantic.
It was also a clear contrast to London, which, again, is not necessarily bad. It just appears as though the British are planning a production of “Rent” in four years’ time. But when you have David Beckham, what do you need 1,000 acrobats for?
In the end, the closing ceremonies are just that – an end – and they have been successful if they make you long for the two solid weeks of canoeing and table tennis that have come before.
As the ceremony drew to a close, the scenes of the past 17 days were projected, day-by-day on the façade of the stadium roof. Then they froze as the flame went out, and a single firework, like a sparkling tear, fell over the stadium.
There can be no doubt. China knows how to orchestrate an Olympics.
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Solving the medal muddle
Mark Sappenfield | 08.24.08
I have solved the medal-table controversy irrefutably.
China won.
Is that total medals or gold medals, you ask. Popular vote or electoral college? Is this the 2000 presidential election all over again? Will there will need to be an emergency session of the Supreme Court to decide who the “winner” of the Olympics is.
Of course, there is no official winner. But the International Olympic Committee (IOC) ranks its medal table by gold medals. That means if someone had happened to win 300 silver and bronze medals and no golds here, it would have ended up being ranked 56th – behind Cameroon, which won a single gold in the women’s triple jump.
What, then, is the point of handing out three medals?
Then again, winning the actual event must count for something.
So here I give you the correct medal table:
1. China – 223
2. United States – 220
3. Russia – 139
4. Great Britain – 98
5. Australia – 89
6. Germany – 83
7. France – 70
8. Korea – 67
9. Italy – 54
10. Japan – 49
The secret math? Three points for a gold, 2 for a silver, 1 for a bronze.
Other crumbs of medal-table trivia:
* By the IOC’s ranking system, Michael Phelps would have finished 10th, one place ahead of France, had he been entered as a country.
* This is only the second time since World War I that two nations have split the gold medal and total medal lead. The other instance was in the 1964 Tokyo Games, when the US won 36 gold medals and 90 overall medals, while the Soviet Union won 30 gold medals and 96 overall medals.
* Compared with its results from Athens, China improved by 19 gold medals and 37 total medals. By far, the greatest increase came in gymnastics, going from one gold, zero silvers, and three bronzes (1-0-3) to 11-1-6 – a gain of 10 gold medals and 14 total medals. No other Chinese sport saw a gain of more than three total medals.
* China maintained or increased its medal totals from Athens in every sport but three. In each of these three, the decrease was only one. Fencing (from 0-3-0 in Athens to 1-1-0 in Beijing), judo (1-1-3 to 3-0-1), and shooting (4-2-3 to 5-2-1). In each, it increased its gold-medal total despite the decline in total medals.
* Fifty-one percent of China’s medals were gold. That is only the third time that more than half of overall leaders’ medals were gold. The others instances were the Soviets in 1972 and the Americans in 1952.
* Fifty-eight percent of American medals came from swimming (31), gymnastics (10), and track and field (23). After those three, America’s best sports by total medals were shooting and fencing, with six apiece.
* In no sport but swimming and track and field did the US win more than two gold medals. China won more than two gold medals in seven sports: badminton (3), diving (7), gymnastics (11), judo (3), shooting (5), table tennis (4), and weightlifting (8).
* There were six medal sweeps: three for the US (men’s 400 meter dash, men’s 400 meter hurdles, and women’s saber), two for China (men’s and women’s singles table tennis), and one for Jamaica (women’s 100 meter dash).
* Of the countries that won more than 10 medals, two won all their medals in one sport. Kenya’s 14 medals and Jamaica’s 11 medals all came in track and field.
* Of the countries that won more than 20 medals, none is more dependent on one sport than Australia: 20 of its 46 medals (43 percent) came from swimming.
* Eighty-seven countries won a medal, surpassing the record of 80, set in 2000.
* Five countries won their first medal: Togo, Mauritius, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Bahrain.
* Three countries won their first gold medal: Panama, Mongolia, and Bahrain.
* Armenia won six medals, all of them bronze. Cuba won 24 medals but only two golds.
* The last medals of Beijing: France (gold), Iceland (silver), Spain (bronze) for men’s handball.
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Patience is golden for American volleyball
Mark Sappenfield | 08.22.08
Lloy Ball freely admits that there was a point in America’s semifinal volleyball match today against Russia when he wanted to tear his teammates’ heads off.
Ball must have thought that he was not wearing a jersey with the No. 1 on it, but with a big, blue X. In the third and fourth sets of a five-set match, it seemed that Russian opposite Maxim Mikhaylov was using him as target practice.
“Lloy looked at me like, ‘Please do something,’” said David Lee, who as a blocker, has the job of protecting Ball and other members of the US rearguard.
But Ball did not raise his voice. “Four or six years ago, I would have started screaming, and I would have dragged the team down,” Ball said after the 25-22, 25-21, 25-27, 22-25, 15-13 victory. “But we’ve learned as a team that we need to squash those feelings and do the basic things – serve, hit, dig, don’t let the ball hit the floor.”
In a word, Ball and his team have learned patience.
For a volleyball program nearly 16 years removed from its last medal – both for the men and women – patience has been the lesson of these Games.
Patience to believe in themselves, though the American men had not beaten Russia in a major international competition since 1993. Patience not to panic when Mikhaylov was raining down spikes like a hailstorm. Patience to wait 16 years for the right mix of talent and teamwork and dedication again to emerge.
The fact is, US volleyball players develop later than their competitors. While American volleyball players are in college, foreign players are playing professionally. Mikhaylov is 20, and he is already playing for Yaroslavich, a team in the Russian Super League, one of the top two professional leagues in the world.
The youngest player on the US men’s team, Lee, is 26. Ball is 36 and this is his fourth Olympics. Yet it is only now, he says, that he has understood fully what it means to be a team player. There is a tattoo on his shoulder. It reads: “Anger is a gift.” His volleyball today suggested the opposite was true.
In the end, it was the potential target of Ball’s anger, Lee, that won it for the US, with a spike at 13-13 in the fifth set and then the crucial, final block to win it.
Both the American men and the women – who have also made the final here – are led by a veteran core that has at last reached its international vintage.
Their two gold-medal matches – the women Saturday and the men Sunday – are not the product of two weeks of good fortune. They have been 16 years in the making.
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In defense of He Kexin, sort of
Mark Sappenfield | 08.22.08
There is a part of me that feels that my Olympics would have been diminished had He Kexin not been here.
This is not to condone cheating. If she and several of her teammates are under age 16, as several Western media reports suggest, she should not have competed. Further reports that the international gymnastics federation (FIG) will investigate are welcome.
That said, He’s uneven bar routine was the single most breathtaking thing I saw during the Olympic gymnastics program.
I say this not to begin a debate about who performed the best routine in nine days of gymnastics, but to point out that in the Olympics – a competition devoted to continually redefining the frontiers of human performance – He is a Louis and Clark of the uneven bars.
It is clear that she could do what she did only because she is so small. For all her talent, 18-year-old American Nastia Liukin could not have done some of the releases and hand holds that He did. At 5-foot-3, 99 lbs., she is simply too big.
So we return to one of gymnastics’ eternal questions: How young is too young to be a professional athlete, which these girls basically are?
The arguments on both sides can be compelling.
The most obvious argument against the FIG’s prohibition on Olympic competition for anyone under 16 is that, had the law been in force in 1976, we never would have known Nadia Comenici. In a sport built on flexibility and the ability to defy gravity, an age limit can prevent gymnasts from competing at the height of their abilities.
The counterargument that the sort of intense training needed to compete internationally is unhealthy for someone so young. A body that is still growing, critics say, cannot cope with such stress, leading to physical problems.
The momentum seems to favoring the counterargument at the moment. The head of FIG has talked of expanding the 16-year-old age limit to all international competitions – not just the Olympics. According to such a law, American Shawn Johnson would not have been the world all-around champion last year. She was 15.
Putting aside the question of whether this gives authoritarian countries a competitive advantage – since they can more easily alter birth data – there seems to be some sense in this. Sporting federations exist not only to promote the sport, but to protect the athletes – from themselves or those who would use them.
Yet I am glad I had the chance to see He Kexin all the same, no matter what her age.
