Olympics 2008

Beijing

There have been occasions during the last 48 hours when I've found it easy to see why some people consider the Olympic Games (any Olympic Games that is, not just this one) to be about as much fun as back-street dentistry and far worse value for money.

The wanton extravagance of it all, the overblown guff that every official or commercial "partner" spouts, the joy-sapping security operation, the sheer waste, the massive fence around everything, the 30 Russian hacks who pushed in front of me at breakfast, especially them.

But then I remember, it's the Olympics.

None of that really matters. It's just grumpiness because me, Blanka Vlasic, Laure Manaudou and the Cuban women's volleyball team are in town and we're impatient to get it on.

The Olympics are an extravagance, that's kind of the point.

The security operation and the fence aren't just there to make me walk further, they're also there to keep me and everybody else safe.

The waste is regrettable but I've been on four foreign stag dos in the last 12 months so who am I to get all Swampy about it? And the Russians couldn't help it, they were hungry.

Let's just start already.

Athletes from 205 nations have turned up to hang about looking talented, make eyes at each other in the Olympic Village and generally do their thing, but most importantly they're here to distract us from all the bad stuff in the world and perhaps even point the way to a future where we don't fight and argue so much.

We might not be able to sort out global trade, greenhouse emissions (certainly not here anyway, and there's no point getting all offended about it, I was genuinely concerned about Tom getting lost in the smog yesterday, let alone what all that gasping was doing to his insides) or what to do about Amy Winehouse, but we can at least get together every four years and agree to Greco-Roman wrestle.

Yeah, I know that's much like the guff the International Olympic Committee speech computer spits out (it's like the Daily Mail headline generator but you get a lot of dreams, hardly any asylum seekers and almost nothing about house prices) but it's also a tiny bit true.

I have no idea if the history books of the future will agree with IOC imagineer-in-chief Jacques Rogge that these Games are set to be "a significant milestone in China's remarkable transformation".

Put alongside past milestones like the arrival of the Mongols, the Opium Wars and that thing we're not allowed to talk about in that big square in the middle of town where they were going to put the beach volleyball until they realised it might not be in the best possible taste, I'd say (to quote the Great Helmsman's first mate Zhou Enlai on another significant milestone) it's far too early to tell.

But what I will say is the good people of Beijing (and there are a lot of them) certainly appear to be in a milestone kind of mood. They're as up for this as my Russian colleagues were for breakfast this morning.

I can also confirm the "remarkable transformation" bit. Buildings appear to be going up so fast here the taxi drivers simply cannot keep up with it all.

I'm staying in a massive complex of at least six 25-storey buildings about 20 minutes north of the Olympic complex and none of the cabbies I've flagged down has ever been here before or even seen it on a map.

There are no more bikes on the streets here these days than there are on London's roads, almost every other local I've seen has a video camera and Chairman Mao would be horrified to see the colours and fabrics his heroic workers are wearing these days.

As for the Olympic venues themselves, well, it's like the Chinese have looked at the rest of the world and decided to go one louder.

The Bird's Nest, the Water Cube, the Lotus Flower, the Ling Long Pagoda (actually not that, it's a bit rubbish), are all, almost quite literally, out of this world.

Who knows how much they really cost, or what will happen to them once the circus leaves town, but come nightfall and it's just you, them and the bats, they really are spectacular.

Monuments to man's hubris or a new superpower's global ambitions writ extra large in stainless steel and glow-in-the-dark membrane?

Difficult to say from this close up but I'd like to think tourists of the future will be able to visit Beijing's Olympic venues and do what I did yesterday in the Forbidden City, which was wander about vaguely amazed.

Whilst I was there I spent a lot of time (at least the hour it took me to go from the Palace of Gathered Elegance to the Palace of Packaged Nibbles) trying to contrive an elaborate Forbidden City/Games metaphor. I couldn't. They all sounded like the starts to IOC speeches.

The closest I got was that the Forbidden City was an artificial world of flowery talk, heightened emotions and prodigious spending and the Olympic Games are...oh, you get the rest.

There's a scene in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor I've always wanted to recreate.

It's when a young Pu Yi jumps on a bike to get away from the boring rituals of government and is chased down a long, cobble-stoned avenue in the Forbidden City by a dozen eunuchs.

It's like a medieval Benny Hill meets It's a Knockout.

What has this got to do with the Olympics? Absolutely nothing.

But like Pu Yi, I'm bored with the ceremonies, rituals and pronouncements. I just want the sport to start.