Praise for Paul Hamm
Mark Sappenfield | 07.29.08
Today, gymnast Paul Hamm is being lauded for his unselfishness. What a difference an Olympiad makes.
Yesterday, Paul Hamm announced his withdrawal from the American gymnastics team, acknowledging that his attempt to recover from the broken hand he suffered in May had failed.
Four years ago, Paul Hamm refused to return the gold medal he had won in gymnastics’ most prestigious event – the all-around – despite the fact that he had won it due a judging error.
In truth, nothing has changed. The champion once branded selfish by some is the same man who now is putting the welfare of the team above his own.
I cannot claim to have great insight into Paul Hamm’s soul. I have only talked to him at a handful of press events, and never one-on-one. But what struck me was that he was always refreshingly frank.
In Athens, he had done nothing wrong, yet he was being asked to pay the penalty for someone else’s mistake. Sporting events often turn on a mistake, usually by the athlete, but sometimes also by those officiating. To publicly implore him to return the medal, as some officials did, was underhanded.
The rules were clear. The medal was his.
This, too, is clear. He cannot compete in Beijing. So rather than holding out in the hope that another few days might improve his condition, he has withdrawn.
Two different decisions, but the same man in each.
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Please rain on my parade
Peter Ford | 07.28.08
Hallelujah! When I drew my curtains this morning, I could see the Beijing television tower, a good 10 km (six miles) from my bedroom window. Five days of smog had cleared overnight.
When I stepped onto my balcony I understood why. A fitful breeze was blowing, which had not only cleared the air but cooled it. The steaming sludge we have been breathing in Beijing for the last few days had gone.
And as I write, the rain is pelting down in sheets fierce enough to make people outside run for cover, even if they have umbrellas. More good news for the Olympic organizers, who have - ironically - been praying for bad weather.
Because bad weather makes for better air. Wind and rain is just what BOCOG needs to clean the city’s pollution out of the atmosphere. It seems strange that the authorities should be hoping for just the sort of weather that would ruin any other major outdoors event, and of course they don’t want this to happen too often.
But the Chinese government has done just about everything it can do to reduce pollution, like closing factories within a 100 km radius of the capital, banning citizens from driving every other day and shutting down building sites.
It has a few more cards up its sleeve: the official China Daily newspaper reported yesterday that the authorities were prepared to order as many as 90 per cent of private vehicles off the roads if the situation requires it. But in the end, it is going to come down to the weather.
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Not in McDonald’s anymore
Mark Sappenfield | 07.28.08
I came to Beijing several weeks before the Olympics, knowing that when I return, I will not be in China. I will be in Olympicland.
To go to an Olympics as a journalist is not to go to a foreign country, but to live, work, and sleep in a world hermetically sealed by chain-link and barbed wire and run entirely by McDonald’s and Cola-Cola.
It is a netherworld connected to its host nation only by the language of the volunteers and the currency needed to buy Big Macs. This is as it should be. The Olympic venues must be secure, though it leads to keeping everything distinctive about the host nation out of the security cordon. Had I come to China only for the Olympics, I never would have been in China.
And I never would have been tempted to try the “man and wife lung slice.”
What this is, I have no idea. But it was on a menu, so I assume it was not a practical joke.
To say that Chinese tastes can differ from American would be an understatement on a par with, “Houston, we have a problem.”
A colleague recently discussed what she ate at a wildly popular restaurant over the weekend. After struggling for a moment to explain it, we worked out the most accurate translation: boiled duck head. Her problem with this meal was not that it was a boiled duck’s head, but that it took an inordinate amount of effort to cull the meat from the dish.
I do not begrudge anyone the right to enjoy a boiled duck’s head. I readily confess that I am among the least adventurous of eaters. This, then, is one of those areas where my Chinese friends and I happily agree to disagree.
The Beijing Catering Trade Association, however, is taking a rather less charitable view of how outsiders will react to the unfamiliar aspects of Chinese cuisine. It has ordained that during the period of the Olympics, restaurants and hotels affiliated with the Games are prohibited from serving dog meat.
Yet it is my opinion that a dish accurately labeled is far less worrisome than the problem of the mistranslated Chinese menu. According to one menu, I recently ate goose intestines. The dish was, in fact, Kung Pao chicken. Also, everything in China seems to be braised. Since I have never enrolled in a French cooking school, I have no idea what happens to something when it is braised.
One restaurant would have me believe that it becomes extremely delicious, as in the “extremely delicious braised mushrooms” on the menu. I resisted the temptation to ask for the “fairly decent braised mushrooms.”
Yet there is a genius in this. Could Monty Python have come up with a dish like “man and wife lung slice,” which, it turns out is indeed a slice of lung prepared in a certain traditional way.
I suggest not, and so I am thankful to have come to Beijing before the Olympics. I wager that man and wife lung slice will not be on the menu at McDonalds.
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Chinese snatch up Olympics tickets
Peter Ford | 07.25.08
A word to the wise: if you are thinking of coming to the Beijing Olympics and picking up tickets when you are here, fuggedaboutit.
Tens of thousands of Chinese fans got there first.
You might find a couple of tickets available to something like the preliminary soccer heat between Belgium and New Zealand, but that’s about it.
For the more prestigious events there will probably be some scalpers around. But they will have to be discreet in a city crawling with police who have announced a 10-15 day jail term for anyone caught re-selling tickets. And the prices will be crazy.
Not as crazy, in my book, as Xu Yong Heng. He’s the guy, now a media darling in China, who showed up at noon on Wednesday to be at the front of the line when the last remaining Olympic tickets went on sale to the public at 9.00 Friday morning. He sat on a piece of cardboard for 45 hours in sweltering heat and he was only allowed two places when the ticket office opened.
Even crazier, though, were those joining the line - thousands of people and a mile and a half behind Mr. Xu – around midnight on Thursday. Even a night sleeping rough wasn’t going to be enough to get them tickets.
This afternoon I phoned one guy I met last night, to see how he had fared. He said he had given up after lunch when the line descended into chaos and angry scuffles broke out between ticket-seekers and policemen. Even the hundreds of police trying to keep order were not enough to stop people cutting in line and he realized his chances were getting slimmer by the hour.
The Olympics are causing Beijing residents a lot of inconvenience - increased security checks everywhere, only allowed to drive every other day, congested metro trains – and I shall be returning to these in later posts.
But there is no doubting the extraordinary enthusiasm that these Games have fired in ordinary Chinese breasts. At the Athens Olympics in 2004, the stadium was half empty for the first week or so. You can bet that won’t happen here.
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Feeling good about themselves
Peter Ford | 07.24.08
You don’t have to be in China long to feel the sense of energy and optimism that pervades this country, as it steams into the 21st century at economic growth rates others can only dream about.
More evidence of just how good most Chinese citizens feel about their country came in a poll released this week showing that a whopping 86 percent of them are satisfied with their nation’s direction. That puts China at the top of the world’s “national mood” table according to the Pew Global Attitudes Survey of 24 countries.
And they are just as upbeat about the Olympics. 96 percent of them expect the games to be a success, and 93 percent of them think the event will boost China’s international image, the poll says.
But there are a few less positive findings: only about 6 Chinese in 10 are satisfied with their own jobs and their income – which puts them below the international average. Three quarters of them said that inflation is a “very big” concern.
That’s not surprising. Food prices have been going up by around 20 percent, year on year, for the past few months.
That worries Chinese. More worrying to outsiders is that most Chinese view other world powers, and foreigners in general, with deep suspicion.
More than two thirds of them view Japan negatively, for example, and 38 percent say Tokyo is an enemy. That has a lot to do with the way Chinese textbooks and television continue to portray the Japanese – who occupied parts of China in the 1930s and 40s – as wicked.
But 34 percent of the respondents also see the US as an enemy, which doesn’t bode too well for what is likely to be one of the world’s most important international relationships for the foreseeable future.
The level of expectations surrounding the Games could be a double-edged sword for the Chinese government, too. If things don’t go so well, for whatever reason, the public might be upset.
If that happens, though, the Chinese media’s track record suggests that they will blame foreigners for the disappointment, and most Chinese will probably follow suit.
