by Zach Bigalke

Created on: January 11, 2009

During the Olympics in Beijing, many events transpired to keep me from enjoying the Games nearly as much as I'd wished.Excitement reigned throughout... but there were lessons learned which extended far beyond merely the action on the track and in the pool, on the beams and the rings and along the road. After a mostly-successful run at covering the Tour de France, I set the laudable if foolhardy goal of providing daily Olympic coverage. But, as Robert Burns' poem "To a Mouse" is often butchered from the original Scots, "The best-laid plans of mice and men/often go awry"...

The pageantry began in full force for the Opening Ceremonies even as the aerial cameras failed to adequately capture the moment for the world's viewing pleasure due to persistent particulates in the air. Whether it be dust or fog or pollution I cannot say - I was not in Beijing. But, watching the footage of the torch lighting by former Chinese gold medalist Li Ning as he performed new acrobatic feats, wires lofting him gracefully around the Bird's Nest and down in artful arcs to the torch, I recognized that the Chinese are dedicated to putting on a good show, even as they denied many of their own citizens the pleasure of witnessing that show together. Parks were closed and locked to public use; the few big screens which were placed up seemed to be the exclusive playthings of the autocratic elite. Call this government Communist if you will, but Karl Marx or even Mao Zedong would be spinning in their graves to hear the ideology of communism being bastardized in such an appalingly class-centered manner. But people were bound to be pushed aside - as was written in one of the essays in Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of NeoLiberalism (New Press, 2007 - edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk [ISBN: 978-1595580764]), the very stadium where the opening ceremonies took place was built on land which was essentially confiscated without compensation from poor Beijing residents. So to see journalists' full researching potential abridged or citizens' right to use collective technology abrogated is no real surprise regardless of any promises made to the IOC... nor is it surprising to see those at the IOC capitulating with each and every restriction clamped on by the Chinese...
But the Games got underway regardless of who did or did not get to witness them, or the location from which they were witnessed. The Olympics are one of the truly global events that ties together disparate sports fans from all corners

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