Beijing Welcomes You by Tom Scocca

Author:Tom Scocca
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781594487842
Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Published: 2011-08-04T21:53:46+00:00

Within two weeks of the earthquake, Sichuan was in the Bird’s Nest, running and jumping. TV and radio were still full of disaster reports and fund-raising specials; orphans were everywhere. But it was time for the Good Luck Beijing Track and Field Open, with a mix of national, international, and provincial athletes. Tragedy and spectacle would make accommodation for each other. The Beijing crowd cheered pointedly when the stadium cameras settled on a Sichuan uniform, or when “Sichuan” appeared on the scoreboard.

Still, the Good Luck meet was above all a showcase for Liu Xiang. The hurdler had followed up his Athens gold medal by setting a new world record, 12.88 seconds, in the summer of 2006. He had become possibly the most famous person in China, beyond even Yao Ming. Now he was having a public rehearsal on the Olympic stage.

The overall national campaign for gold medals was principally about tactics and manpower, not individual heroism; the goal had been to find sports in which Chinese athletes could most feasibly compete, and train them up to win. If the gold medal count were going to be won, it would be won by an army of target shooters, weight lifters, and synchronized divers.

But Liu Xiang was an athlete in the Western, heroic mode. Chinese people had not believed that a Chinese competitor could possess natural superiority in running and jumping. Even when Liu had won in Athens, Chinese observers (and Liu himself) tried to credit it to his timing and technique, rather than sheer speed and muscle.

As Liu kept winning, people stopped trying to rationalize it and yielded to awe. By 2008, he was the subject of a commercial and popular personality cult, ubiquitous beyond comprehension. If he wasn’t hurdling something on a billboard for Lenovo computers or Haier appliances or Visa credit cards, he was drinking Coca-Cola; if he wasn’t drinking Coca-Cola, he was drinking Yili-brand dairy products. The face and legs of Liu Xiang soared over the entire landscape. China Daily would report before the Games that his commercial endorsements had fused together in the public’s mind such that 15 percent of the public wrongly assumed that he must have been associated with Pepsi, too.

Before I saw Liu Xiang, I had business with the Bird’s Nest itself. Down in the basement, outside an empty press conference hall, I finally put my finger on the stadium problem. I mean this literally. In front of me, plunging at an angle from the ceiling to the floor, was one of the stadium’s columns, like the one I had rapped on at the Racewalking Challenge. On one edge, the silvery surface had been chipped by some passing object. In the chip, a dark gray was showing. I pressed my fingertip into the chipped part. When I pulled it back, there was concrete dust on it.

By now, I had been reading and writing about the stadium structure from various distances for years: “a lattice of interwoven steel” (The New York Times) . . . “a tangle of steel trusses” (The Times) .

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