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James Fallows |
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James Fallows
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Take me out to the ball game (Beijing version)
Monday night fun, watching Team USA take on Team China at the Beijing Wukesong Olympic baseball field. The Olympic basketball stadium, which stands next door, is destined as a lasting addition to Beijing's sporting patrimony. The baseball field, like the velodrome and (sigh!) the beach volleyball area in Chaoyang Park, is destined to vanish as soon as the games are done.
Beforehand, much good natured cross-national cheering in the stands. The US team was the favorite but this was not necessarily a gimme. The Chinese team had, for the first time ever, beaten the Taiwanese. (I mean, the team...
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Too much Olympics? Try 'Ace in the Hole'
No more heart to watch the Olympics now that Michael Phelps and Liu Xiang have left the stage? To say nothing of the departed archery teams, lightweight weightlifters, rowers, etc?
Fill the empty hours, and get into the right mood for the upcoming conventions and general election campaign, with a fabulously bleak and cynical old movie from Netflix: Ace in the Hole.
 Start-off benefit: Kirk Douglas's shirtless scenes an easy transition from watching toned bodies in the Water Cube.
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Empty-seat mystery, cont.
In several previous posts I've mentioned the paradox of Olympic tickets being flat "sold-out," yet huge tracts of seats sitting empty. Many people have written in to solve the mystery. This, from Alf Hickey, reflects the consensus view:
Large amounts of empty seats are actually quite common at Chinese concerts or sporting events that claim to be "sold out." The reason for this is that a large amount of tickets are given to the bigwigs who organize the events so they can guanxi them out ["build relationships"] as needed. Since the Olympics had so many different organizing...
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Saying something nice about CCTV
As I've harped on before, in posts too numerous to link to, China's state-run network CCTV has been unashamedly nationalistic in choosing which Olympic events to show. OK: most people watching are Chinese.
But the play by play expert commentators seem surprisingly non-home-team in what they say. Sports broadcasting is its own stripped down dialect in any language, and the CCTV team seems about as willing to apply the standard Chinese versions of "beautiful" or "well done" or "not bad at all" terms to a nice dive, three-point shot, good serve by a rival as to one of their...
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Biggest news of the Olympics for China: Liu Xiang is out
Incredible. During the entirety of our past two years in China, Liu Xiang has been the face of the upcoming Olympic games. He is China's greatest-ever track and field athlete, defending Olympic gold medalist in the 110m hurdles, the man whose smile and whose action-shots soaring over hurdles we have seen in maybe ten thousand TV ads, billboards, subway signs, and every other medium.
In happier times, as Olympic champion in Athens:
He stumbled just now in a heat in which someone else false-started; then...
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James Fallows 
