Seeking America’s first soccer superstar in Beijing
Mark Sappenfield | 08.13.08
Next week could have been a little like a coming out party.
Ever heard of Jozy Altidore? I would guess not.
But Villareal, the second-ranked team in arguably the world’s best league, Spain’s La Liga, paid his American team $10 million for him. In international soccer, where players are bought outright from other teams, not traded, this is a record transfer fee for an American.
As an Olympian, Altidore could have made his bow here had the US been among the medals. Yet tonight, a US defender picked up a red-card ejection in the third minute and the US never recovered. Playing a man down for 87 minutes, the US lost, 2-1.
Altidore, at least, has something to look forward to: becoming America’s first-ever world-class soccer player.
The others that have come before have so far failed. Landon Donovan decided he would rather live in southern California than test himself in the world’s best leagues, and Freddie Adu, when he leaves Beijing, will likely go back to the bench for Benfica, a Portuguese team.
Altidore is the Next Great Hope.
There are reasons to think he has the best chance of the lot. Even in the days of the weak dollar, $10 million counts as in investment. It means Villareal want him to succeed, and he will be given every chance to.
Moreover, unlike Adu and Donovan, who look like one stiff defender’s elbow could break them in half, Altidore is built like a boxer. He does not dance through defenses so much as bear down on them, as if the field were tilted toward their goal.
Yet the likes of Brazil turn out about 50 players a year like Altidore, of which maybe two or three become world class. Altidore and Adu, still only 19, make a class of two.
Even that is an improvement over the past, however. Altidore might not be the man to break through on the world stage, but he is a sign that America is heading in the right direction.
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Quality vs. quantity in medals race
Simon Montlake | 08.13.08
Day 5 of the Games in Beijing and no prizes for guessing which American swimmer is making headlines.
Of course, Michael Phelps isn’t the only American scooping up medals. In fact, a quick look at NBC’s Olympics website tells me that the US is leading the table with 28 medals, as of mid-afternoon here.
Wait a minute, though. I thought China was ahead in the medals, pulling hometown advantage and pleasing the crowds of flag-waving patriots packed into the venues.
Did I miss something?
A quick look at the official Beijing Olympics website reassures me that China definitely is No. 1, thanks to the 17 gold medals that its athletes have earned so far. The US, with its 10 golds – half of them awarded to Phelps – is No. 2.
So we have two different ways of counting the medals tally: one by the overall number of medals, the other by the number of golds.
As far as the International Olympics Committee is concerned, it’s the latter method that matters. Nations that win the most gold medals get the top ranking, with any ties decided by counting the number of silvers, or if there’s another tie, bronzes.
By this count, which seems to be the international standard judging by visits to British, Canadian, and Japanese newspaper websites, host nation China leads the table.
But not in the US media. USA Today, CNN, Sports Illustrated and ESPN all stick to the formula that if it’s a medal, it’s a score. More scores mean more points. And so on.
Might this be American exceptionalism writ large? Or a reflection of a nation in denial as China guns for the Olympian crown that the USA has worn since 1996?
It certainly isn’t a scoring system that’s likely to get much traction in China, where the all-out drive for gold medals – silvers don’t count, sorry – is palpable this year.
A popular saying, usually attributed to a ranking member of the government’s sports body, posits that a gold medal is worth a thousand silvers.
Italians might want to quibble over the US ranking system. Going by the absolute medals count – as favored by NBC – Australia and Russia take 4th and 5th place respectively, behind the US, China, and South Korea. Italy is 6th with 10 medals.
Flip over to the official Beijing site, though, and Italy has snuck into 4th place, having tied Australia with four golds and pulled ahead with four silvers to two for Australia. La dolce vita, indeed.
I would be fascinated if anyone can explain why US media organizations have devised a different way of tallying national Olympics success from everybody else.
It might lead to no end of bafflement at the end of the games if the US and China both claim victory in the medals table. That’s a head-to-head worth watching out for.
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In the Water Cube, America’s gold-medal model
Mark Sappenfield | 08.12.08
Consider this morning’s performance at the Water Cube a template for the United States. If it is going to have any chance of chasing China for the Olympic gold-medal lead, this is precisely how American athletes will have to do it.
Four races. Three golds.
Add in two silvers and two bronzes, and the swimmers won seven medals in 40 minutes of work. For the first time, it was the sort of swimming hegemony that we have been conditioned to expect from the Americans.
The US Olympic Trials are as difficult a meet as the Olympic Games, we are often told. Today, it was true.
The performance, however, offers a clue into the different ways that the US and China go about their medal-winning business.
The Chinese come in quietly but consistently, like a Seattle drizzle, day after day, another weightlifting gold, another diving gold.
Before you know it, China has 11 gold medals.
By contrast, the US must come in like a flood. Yes, there will be the occasional pleasant surprise – Walter Eller’s double-trap shotgun gold today, for example.
But it to make a real dent in the golden side of the medal table, the Americans must win events in floods – clutching fistfuls of golds in mere minutes – as they did tonight.
The reason is that America is dominant in only two sports: swimming and track and field. This is not a disaster, considering that they have the most medals of any two sports combined. But it means the Americans must make the most of every session.
Like three golds in 40 minutes.
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Faking it
Peter Ford | 08.12.08
Oh dear. The Olympic Games may change some aspects of China’s international image, but they won’t be doing anything to counter the country’s reputation for fakery.
And on a somewhat bigger scale than the usual ripped-off Adidas sneakers or Prada bags, or $1.00 DVD’s. It turns out that the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games itself was faked.
Parts of it, anyway. Remember the cute little girl in a red dress who sang while the Chinese flag was being brought into the stadium at the beginning? Lin Maoke is indeed as sweet as she looked on television, but that wasn’t her voice you heard. She was lip synching to a recording of another little girl called Yang Peiyi.
Organizers resorted to this subterfuge in the name of “national interest,” the general Music Designer of the Opening Ceremony explained in a radio interview two days ago with the Beijing People’s Broadcasting Station.
“It is the image of our national music, national culture,” Chen Qigang said.
The trouble was that Lin Maoke was the prettier of the two girls, but a Politburo member no less (one of the top nine men in the Chinese government hierarchy) attending a rehearsal ruled that her voice was not good enough.
Yang Peiyi, however, was not pretty enough, in the eyes of the ceremony’s director. So he gave her voice to little Lin Maoke.
That way, according to Mr. Chen, “we have a perfect voice and a perfect image … the two combined together.”
As the Chinese stretch for “flawless” in every sphere, they are not averse to a bit of jiggery-pokery.
Another spectacular element of the Opening Ceremony was the march of 29 footprints in the sky, flashing in fireworks above Beijing. I saw them, because I was outside the Bird’s Nest stadium. But spectators inside watching on a screen, and one billion people around the world watching on TV, actually saw computer-generated graphics instead, because organizers didn’t think they would be able to film the real thing properly. Only the last footprint, visible from the camera positions inside the stadium, made it into the broadcast.
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Xinjiang violence has silver lining for Beijing
Peter Ford | 08.11.08
Twenty-seven deaths in a series of attacks by separatist militants wielding explosives are not the ideal background for China’s Olympic Games. But when you look more closely at the recent violence in the restless Muslim region of Xinjiang, it does not look so bad for Beijing after all.
For a start, the two attacks – one killing 16 policemen and the other involving the deaths of 10 assailants and one security guard on Sunday morning, according to the police – happened more than 1,750 miles from Beijing.
Armed separatists have issued two videos in recent weeks threatening to attack Olympic sites. But so far they have confined their operations – destructive as they are – to the western province of Xinjiang, where the Muslim Uighur minority chafes under Chinese rule.
There has been no indication that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), the central pro-independence group, is capable of launching an operation in Beijing, which the Chinese authorities have swamped with security forces.
That is key for the Chinese government, which has promised the world a safe Olympics, and which has stressed repeatedly to its own officials that security should be their top priority.
Still, the attack on the policemen in Kashgar and the spate of bomb attacks on government buildings before dawn on Sunday in Kuqa mark the most dramatic wave of violence by presumed Uighur separatists for more than a decade.
The Chinese police have been claiming for more than a year now to have been killing or arresting “terrorists,” breaking up their plots and foiling their attacks. They have shared very little evidence of their success with the outside world, however, which has made some observers skeptical of Beijing’s insistence that ETIM represents a real threat.
Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks, but assuming that they are indeed the work of ETIM, or a group associated with them, they give credence to Beijing’s arguments.
Another plus for the authorities.
