The Corner

Oh yes I’ve settled in. Well and truly into my stride. It must be something to do with recovery from the jet lag. It might in fact have something to do with being better lagged.

I was finding it slightly odd that I was sniffing despite temperatures being between 88 and 92F. All the pre-games publicity about the environment made me think it might be something to do with air quality.

But I think it’s the air conditioning. I’m not used to it. Numbing humidity outside into the Ice Station Zebra that is the International Broadcast Centre.

For a press conference involving the soon to be anointed world number one tennis player Rafael Nadal and the rest of the Spain team, I went from the ice station out into the clammy madness and into the Main Press Centre which must also be microclimatically linked to the polar caps.

Not good.

To offset these extremes I’ve now started wearing a jacket inside the IBC.

It's bizarre that I need to think about extra layers in these sort of temperatures but ay, there’s the rub.

I feel cosier and that’s made me feel better or it’s perhaps overheating my self-belief.

While being given a cordial but functional tour of the Olympic Village Pin Centre, the pin ambassador was explaining to me the environmentally friendly properties of the centre.

She added: “China is a big country and so we’ve got to be aware of not making too much pollution.”

“Is that something your generation is more aware of? I inquired. “What, you’re 22? 23?....are those the kind of things you were told about during your school days…..?

“No I’m 19......”

“Oh I’m sorry, it’s just that your English is so good I thought you must be older...”

Even I knew the needle had exploded off the smarmometer. But I needed to oil myself out of a glaring error. But Chen Xi – all 19 years of her – guided me a tad more fervently around the centre outlining in far more detail the whizzer projects.


There’s one in which the athletes are given a T shirt emblazoned with: “I’m From Earth” because it has been made from five recycled plastic bottles.

Indeed as she was telling me, a Croatian athlete was measuring up for his free sample. He was XXL and actually looked like he was hewn from granite.

The drift is to hand the T shirts it out to the competitors so that when they wear it they will remember their time in Beijing and also highlight China’s increasing desire for environmental engagement. When I spoke to Ms Chen only 5,000 of the 11,000athletes staying in the Olympic Village had taken up the offer.

I suggested that any leftovers should be handed out to the journalists. “That’s always a great way to get the message across,” I added.

“That’s a good idea. I will say it to my manager.”

Touché.

The Olympian

Just one day after taking my hat off to the Australian swimmer Hayden Stoeckel for overcoming his fear of pain and talking to journalists, it seems appropriate to glory, laud and honour Michael Phelps. The one time youngster with attention deficit disorder has metamorphosed into a concentrated champion.


Number four and five came on Wednesday. Not talking about buses here but Phelps’s gold medals tally.

Sitting in the commentary positions I was looking down on the chap in lane four of the 200 metres butterfly final and was thinking he’s not mashing up the opposition in the way that he usually does.

The 23 year old from Baltimore won nevertheless in a world record time of 1:52.03. It was the third world record we’d seen that morning.

The first was set in the first semi-final of the 100 metres freestyle by the Frenchman Alain Bernard. He’d seen his mark eclipsed by the Australian glamour boy Eamon Holmes on Monday in the 4x100m freestyle relay final.

And then to top it all…Bernard was passed in the final centimetres by the American Jason Lezak who claimed gold. Ouch. Stripped and fleeced.

So Bernard’s fist pumping on Wednesday after posting 47.20 seconds was a way of marking out his terrain.

So when Holmes lined up for the second semi-final? Me? I ducked to avoid the wave of testosterone.

Holmes has suspended his much publicised relationship with fellow Australian swimmer Stephanie Rice to concentrate on his aquatic actions.


The beau dived in and 47.05 seconds later he’d taken back the world record. Cue some ripper, good on yer mate fist pumping.

When Bernard and Holmes rejoin the beefcake stakes on Thursday morning, I’m taking a bucket along so I can later bottle the pheromones from that splash of cultures.

Consequently Phelps’s fourth gold of the games and his rise to the pinnacle of a hallowed elite was all the more impressive and graceful.

I’m sure Phelps is good for a few gallons of adrenalin and he acquired number four, it would seem, against the odds.

Athletes, as we realise all too well, are machines. Once they start their journey “into the moment” (Rice’s phrase), anything which is not preordained can unleash the most fearsome meltdowns.

Jessica Schipper had a suit malfunction just before the final of the 100 metres butterfly final on Monday. Her Australian teammate, Libby Trickett, helped to calm her down.

Trickett who won the gold spoke of Schipper’s resilience to return from the netherlands of disaster and swim into third place.

“We’ve all been there,” bemoaned Trickett.

Phelps revealed on Wednesday that his goggles were full of water during the final stages of the butterfly final. “I couldn’t see, he said. “I was trying to make out the ‘T’ on the bottom to try and judge my turn and my finish but I was more or less just trying to count strokes because I know how many strokes I take per fifty and I was hoping to be dead on so I could hit the walls perfectly.”

Ah perfection. That old chestnut.

Phelps added. “I was able to get my hand on the wall first and it was a best time but I think I was just disappointed because I know I can go faster than that.”

It was a world record.

Now that’s top posturing.

The Salute

Since I'm amid all these Olympian values, it seems only apt to hail wondrous achievement much in the same way that the antennae are tuned to detect bunkum.

For this reason on Tuesday I unreservedly take my hat off to the affable Australian swimmer Hayden Stoeckel.

The self-avowedly shy country boy from Berri, South Australia, won the 100 metres backstroke bronze medal on the most salient sporting stage behind the legend that is Aaron Peirsol and his fellow American Matt Grevers.

Stoeckel who trains in Adelaide, the main town in South Australia, came in to face the media and instantly declared that he didn’t like facing the media. So much so that he’d even underperformed in races to avoid the glare of limelight.

He’s been given some training, he said, which had helped him conquer his trepidation about being up close and personal with the wolves.

But truth be told, it was an adoring pack that he encountered after his efforts in the pool. Mind you at 6ft 5ins tall, I’d dare anyone to try and rile the lad.

Questions were more biographical about his parents and what he did for hobbies.

“I just like to watch footie and hang out with me mates,” he replied. It seemed perfectly normal and healthy for someone who’d turned 24 two days into the games.

He also revealed that he’d given up swimming eight years ago but was persuaded to get back into the pool by his parents.

More recently there’s been work with a psychologist to help him accept that suffering is good for his art.

On Monday Stoeckel had become a contender for the 100 metres backstroke after setting the fastest time in the semi finals in a new Olympic record of 52.97 seconds.

His coaches in the Australian camp quickly calmed him down by telling him that he still had a final to race.

They did a good job.

By contrast another Australian, Leisel Jones, was so comfortable with the cameras and the questions on Tuesday that you could have mistaken her for a meejah darling.

But then again she has been told since her mid teens that she is the anointed one in the breastroke. She was selected for the Australian team at 14 and at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 won silver.

When she set a world record in the 200m breaststroke in the run up to the Athens games for years later, she was expected to take the gold. But it didn’t work out like that.

She came third in the 100 metres and second in the 200 metres.


Now at the ripe old age of 22. She was voluble as she outlined her odyssey from the despair and defeat in Greece to the glory and gold in China.

The message essentially was that there was more to her life than swimming.

What I find fascinating about being in Beijing is hearing these tales of the intangible. The driven one becomes a tougher competitor by gaining a wider outlook and the taciturn one explodes through embracing focus.

“You’ve got to hurt to succeed,” said Stoeckel. “I never liked pain. As soon as I hit that pain barrier I’d back off. And I’ve just learned now that you’ve got to push it.

“ If you hurt in training you’re not going to hurt in a race. You do 32 100s and it’s just hurts and hurts and you come out and do 100 metres and you think I can do 32 of these.

“Then you come out here and do 100m and swim awesome and not hurt and it’s just an amazing feeling.”


Will you get recognised when you go back to Berri? slurped one of the wolves. “Oh yes because it’s not very big. I might even get noticed in Adelaide…”

A shy lad looked worried for an instant.

But with his height and what he’s done, people aren’t likely to take chunks out of him.

The Shocked and Stunned

Well you could have knocked me down with a feather.

Just when I thought that it might have been a bit harsh to set up a “squirmometer’’, confirmation has come that is so very much needed.

Maybe it has something to do with all that water going into their heads but the swimmers are providing streams of unconsciousness.

After the 41 year old American Dara Torres provided us with: “Age is only a number,” and “the water doesn’t know how old you are when you hit it”, the British swimmer Rebecca Adlington came up with a swift combination of phrases one of which I believed had been consigned to the list of no-nos.

When I saw that the 19 year old was from Mansfield in Nottinghamshire, my mind went back to my time on the Nottingham Evening Post in the mid 1980s.

Her very presence at the Olympics would have been a big story. The fact that she’s won gold will be bugled, I’m sure, across the front of the paper.

And rightly so for - to rework the stock phrase of Mick Channon, an English former footballer who was for a while a TV pundit - the girl done well.

But it’s on that score that she came up well short.

Asked how she felt about being the first British woman since 1960 to win gold in the pool, Adlington said: “It’s absolutely amazing. It hasn’t sunk in yet. I’m over the moon.”

The last phrase would have been familiar to Channon and his ilk from the 1970s.

It was a flourish that we used to hear virtually every Saturday night on BBC TV’s Match of the Day. And it made the progression from the mouths of footballers into the vernacular to suggest transcendant elation.

Conversely the set expression to epitomise rank injustice or abject misery became “sick as a parrot”.


Some inventive players tried to introduce some flair into the post-match analysis game with “mad as a dog” and some even tried “chuffed” to describe the joy of victory.

But while that sort of eloquence was welcome, they never made the journey into the public mind.

A couple of years ago, the Chelsea midfielder Frank Lampard – dubbed one of the more articulate of his generation because he passed some exams at school - used the word “gutted” after a narrow loss.

I thought I detected a wry smile on his mouth but maybe that was the bitter taste of defeat.

Perhaps Lampard, who is deemed to be media savvy, was using it with a tad of post-modern irony.

Don’t think that’s the case for young Adlington. Her press conference responses suggested that she isn’t used to the attention.

But not even interviews with the Nottingham Evening Post will have prepared her for what she is going to start experiencing from now.

She’s a gold medallist in her first Olmpic games at the age of 19.

The only thing now is that the pressure will probably mount up on her to defend her title on home soil in Britain in four years time.

It’s all set up for a brilliant story on that angle. But my abiding memory will be of her and compatriot Jo Jackson - who got a bronze - just smiling and hugging each other for a good minute in the pool like two kids.

It was natural and sincere.

They’d got a result.

The Rains

It had to happen. The rain that was predicted for Friday night’s opening ceremony extravaganza came to us on Sunday. And so rather than being grey and hot it is wet and grey.

I’m not yet sure which I prefer. But since it was damp I thought why not go and watch the swimming.

I would have probably done this even it had been the usual clammy humidity outside.

Off I squelched to the National Aquatics Centre which is also known as the Water Cube. This is one of the big buildings of these games. Designed by the Chinese State Construction International Company, Australia PTW Architects and ARUP Australia, it houses some 17,000 people.

And there was indeed a cacophony as the American Michael Phelps broke his own world record to take the 4x100m individual medley. It was the first of what he hopes will be a trawl of eight golds.

There was more screaming as Park Tae-Hwan won South Korea’s first Olympic swimming gold in the 400m freestyle.

And you can imagine the frenzy as the Chinese duo Guo Jingjing and Wu Minxia retained their Olympic title in the synchronised three metre springboard diving.

A few days into the competitions and the hosts are racking up the gold medals. And who’d begrudge them that after laying on such a tremendous show.


What are also mounting are the clichés. Before we get anywhere near the track and field, there have been indignities uttered to the point where I've been forced to establish a measure.

So as the thermometer of competition rises, a “squirmometer” will monitor any post event triteness.

It’s not that the comments are untrue or offensive, they just make you wriggle in your set and raise your eyebrow a bit.


Perhaps it’s because the statements emerge in the hinterland of victory.

The Australian Stephanie Rice who took the gold medal in the 4x100 individual medley in a world record time seemed quite deft as she deflected questions about her relationship with the Australian swimmer Eamon Sullivan.


But then she talked about being “in the moment” in the pool.

OK. But Ugh.

The American swimmer Dara Torres anchored her team to silver in the 4x100m freestyle relay. She is 41 and many of the swimmers in Sunday’s race weren’t even born when she was competing in her first Olympics back in Los Angeles in 1984.

But her aquatic longevity – this is her fifth Olympics - hasn’t salvaged her from the ravages of the cliché. “Age is only a number,” she intoned.

True, she’s won 10 Olympic medals. But ugh.

“When we are in the water, it doesn’t matter because the water doesn’t really know how old you are when you hit the water.”

Eau dear.

The Aftershock

With the opening ceremony for the games declared a success, those connected with it can rightly shine in the glory.

Zhang Yimou, the artistic director of the four hour extravaganza, said his workload was 100 times that of making a film.

And he's been doing epics of late.

He mused: “The films are personal works, the success of which matters only to the director. But directing the Olympic Games is totally different. It determines whether the Games get off to a successful start or not.”

So no pressure there then.

Yao Ming, who plays his basketball in the NBA with the Houston Rockets, seems to be revelling in his role as a giant among his compatriots. Well he is 7ft 2ins tall and he’s at ease with his role as a sponsor friendly conduit between China and the United States.

The two countries will play on Sunday. China are the underdogs so they have nothing to lose conceded Yao. “It won’t be easy but it will be an honour and a precious memory, one that will last a lifetime,” he added.

The 27 year old is at the centre of a team that’s not expected to do well.

The people who have it tough are the one’s who’ve been built up for this Olympic moment.

The 110 metres high hurdles champion Liu Xiang has cover boy good looks and the weight of a nation on his shoulders as he tries to leap over those obstacles.

His path to retaining his Olympic crown has been slightly eased because the Cuban, Dayron Robles, grabbed his world record in June.

No such leavening of the burden for the markswoman Du Li. She won gold in Athens four years ago in the 10m air rifle coming in ahead of the Russian Lioubov Galkina and the Czech Katerina Kurkova.

But on Saturday morning Du well and truly cracked. She slumped to overall fifth and fled the shooting range in tears without talking to the waiting pack.

When she’d stopped blubbing she revealed that the pressure of defending her title on home soil and of winning the first gold medal of the games had been too much. Much too much.

Kurkova – now Emmons - who won Saturday's event, told the vultures of the Chinese press: “You swarmed around her even in her training. I can’t bear that if I’m in that situation, so I can feel what Du must have felt.”

That will be the gold medal then.

The Opening Ceremony

It started at eight and I wasn't late. How could I be late. I’d come to Beijing for this very date. The Olympics started big time at eight in the evening on the eighth.

This hour was chosen because eight is the luckiest number for the superstitiously minded basically because the the number eight sounds like the word for prosperity.

Sounds good to me. Four by contrast is the unluckiest number because it sounds like the Chinese word for death.

And do you know what…I’m in building four at the hotel complex.

Despite all the lucky numbers going for it, nothing about the opening ceremony was left to chance.

The cast of thousands who participated in the four hour extravaganza had been preparing for months. Five thousand years of Chinese culture were projected to us during the show.

The artistic director behind it all was Zhang Yimou and he’s no Johnny-cum-lately.

He’s the man who infused art house opacity with translucence. What does that mean?

I'm not entirely sure but it seems to sum up his output such as Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern and the Story of Qiu Ju.

They were heavy with symbolism. I mean weighty. I remember watching Raise the Red Lantern when I lived in south London. I went to see it at one of the many art house cinemas that used to inhabit the city in the late 1980s.

The screen was sufficiently large so you could appreciate the symbolic moments.

The film was building to a crescendo of catastrophe and when some red dye spilt onto a white linen sheet, you just knew woe was a-coming.

That 58 year old Yimou had his hands on the wheels of our drive into wonderland was reassuring.

It turned out to be a visual feast. But then there was too much at stake for it to be left to something like luck.