Seeing through the Beijing smog
I'm really looking forward to seeing the Olympic Games, which is more than can be said for most of the inhabitants of Beijing who can't see a bleeding thing right now.
At this rate they're going to have to have the Olympics, the Paralympics, and the Asthmalympics.
The smog was pretty dire in Athens but things have come to a rum do when officials are threatening to cancel long-distance events altogether.
Surely they could compromise a little - anyone else remember Fun Size marathons?
You worry about Paula Radcliffe in these conditions wheezing away like a rusty bike. And I recall my favourite British athlete of all time the mighty Steve Ovett reduced to the sort of breathlessness only experienced by the adoption agency for Brangelina by the rotten air of Los Angeles.
Still everything else in China seems to be working fine and even the journalists feel like they've got a little bit of room to breathe - even though breathing is rather difficult there right now.
So we await the opening ceremony - the bit where organizers waste the most money and the world gasps at how many fireworks can be let off in half-an-hour.
Most opening ceremonies these days are a little bit short on class and a bit long on contributors.
There'll be a lot of small kids dragooned into some sort of frighteningly slick choreography that makes you worry for their futures.
My daughter used to be involved in a local jazz dance club in Stockton-on-Tees and you've never seen so much uncoordinated lard in one place, bless 'em. (Not my lass of course, who has pondered long and hard between them two options that British teenagers struggle with these days - fags or food - and she's gone for the former.)
Still there were bags more charm in seeing a bunch of lasses doing their best than a bunch of seven-year-olds looking like they've been pre-programmed with the insertion of a microchip in the back of their skulls.
Eighty leaders of state are there too, none of them too keen to mention Chinese domestic policy and all of them happy to do their share of bowing and scraping.
Bush had a little pop of course - in Thailand, and while he's a total irrelevance any road so it doesn't much matter what the bloke says, Brown's gone to Suffolk but he's going turn up at the closing ceremony to pick up the keys for the next one.
Not quite sure where that puts him in terms of his position on the whole thing. Between a rock and a hard place, I suppose but he's probably getting used to that by now.
In the meantime the British Olympic team (not Team GB, please God I'm going to bite my way through all the hardwood furniture in our house if I hear that phrase every two minutes) have already lost a boxer cos he couldn't make the weight.
Frankie Gavin is devastated but it's a shame he wasn't a little more emaciated. The bloke really only had one task going into the Games, that's to weigh less than 60 kg.
Someone, not least himself, has effed up royally. Jockeys go on drastic weight loss regimes as a matter of course which is how they can arrive at the big meets weighing about the same as a finger puppet. My daughter says the bloke was clearly not smoking enough but then she's pretty keen for Amy Winehouse to release a book on nutrition.
The other decision that has slightly bemused me is giving Mark Foster the flag. I tend to agree with Kelly Sotherton - give it to someone who's won a gold medal.
Foster's a top lad, obviously, and the fact that he's competing at 38 is impressive enough. But Great Britain's strength and depth is plain for all to see: Bradley Wiggins or Chris Hoy should be at the front of things.
The cyclists are going to be the Fort Knox of Britain's efforts and so you might as well reward them early. In fact I'd like to see the cyclists being employed by Britain's energy companies when they get back.
If you hooked up that Rebecca Romero to the National Grid you could power a small village and reduce your carbon footprint in no time.
Come to think of it that tiny whinger Katie Melua banged on about there being nine million bicycles in Beijing - rig em all up to the electric, get the underemployed to pedal like bloggery and that's the smog gone in a couple of days, isn't it? Why don't people think these things through, eh?
The other contender would've been the bloke Ben Ainslie, although it's less easy to see why that bloke is so good cos when you watch highlights of the sailing you can't see what anyone's doing so it's hard to get a grip on it.
Plus there's all that obscure stuff about jibbing your spinnaker and tacking to the leeward side of the fo'c'sle which just leaves me confused. Still Ainslie's won two gold medals in the last two Olympics which is achievement enough to give him the flag.
I've got nowt against Foster, it just seems odd that you give the honour to a bloke whose most significant Olympic contribution was to insist on wearing his own lycra and getting ditched from the team by Bill Sweetenham.
Still,the only bit of the opening ceremony that really counts is the athletes' parade, all of them utterly chuffed to their very bits to be there.
Who will be this year's one-man team? some obscure Pacific island's flag held aloft by a cross-eyed archer or a twenty-stone sprinter? It doesn't matter much. It's just marvellous to see.
I'm Derek Robson. People call me Robbo. Legend has it I was raised in the furnace and smog of Teesside. Some might say I took the hard road. I like to tell folk I had trials for Middlesbrough, for Hartlepool and for burglary (not guilty). I've always loved sport. My job is to say it as I see it - whether it's in the bar of the Blue Bell or on this blog. You won't find me calling a spade a soil-redistribution implement.
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~27~RS~)
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if your looking for one man teams you need the russians (at least after some more get banned)
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Is it really necessary to comment like that about the synchronised choreography? There's no way anyone British could could better the organised presentation of the sequences, so surely one should just admire it? China has a lot going for it and I fear your comments represent a dis-trust of the nation. Let it present itself and lets sit back and enjoy the show.
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mrllcoolj
i can do better then them lot and im british!!! so shut up and get over it! the blogs only Robbo havin a laugh! some people have got nothin better to do then moan????!!!!! unlike me!!!
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Give over, Gobbo! If you don't like the air quality you can always hold your breath for half and hour and do us all a favour.
It is what it is. It's the same sort of comment we make about a quagmire of a January football pitch, the same for both teams. It's the same air quality for all athletes, pretty democratic really for a country like China.
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Robbo: I agree that opening ceremonies for the Olympics are wasteful and only mildly entertaining. They've been that way since Moscow in '80. I miss the innocent, sweet and simple opening ceremonies of Munich. (Maybe the terrorists killed more than we realized at the time.)
Now, we all KNOW that London is not going to have 20,000 dancers performing a ballet of Sense and Sensibility with a medley of Beatles' tunes, RIGHT??
Can't wait.
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I do really feel bad for you Robbo...not sure if you had a bad childhood or you are just that sort of person who likes to see the darker side....anyways, BBC likes you - so good for you Mate..
China - Well done on the Opening Ceremony - it was terrific !!
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Can't you find something positive to say? 20 per cent of the world's population use 90 per cent of its resources.
For all its problems, China doesn't invade countries to steal things (like oil). or to force them to open up their markets to drugs (like opium).
Why not give those one-man Pacific teams a break? As someone lucky enough to be born into the 20 per cent of the world's population that doesn't consider a sweatshop or call centre to be a middle class job, perhaps you should vary your comedy a bit?
check out the writers in Guardian - they're much better at satire than you.
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But China does invade small countries to simply annexe them (Tibet) ...
However this said I just love the Olympics. Trouble is that living in Bermuda the local joke TV station has blocked off all the cable TV stations covering the event so we just get US coverage which is all about -- you guessed it -- American beach volleyball players, US women's soccer, US this and US that interspersed with interviews of potential US gold medal winners....blah blah blah. As yet I haven't been able to see any sport. So do enjoy the BBC coverage. You don't know what you're missing.
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"invade small countries to simply annexe them (Tibet)"
Go read "New Left Review" on this topic. Imagine what it means to be told that one is a peasant and lives like a dog because of reincarnation.
The problem of religious fundamentalism exists in Buddhism too. Tibet was part of China before the US became independent. It fell out of its control in the 19th century because of Western incursions.
If you only follow one point of view on the world then you can't really complain about being surrounded by US media.
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Tibet was part of the Mongol empire, not part of China. When the Mongols invaded China they both became part of the realm of Kublai Khan, which all dissolved pretty quickly after his death. China's claim to Tibet is based on this, not on any historical indivisibility of the two countries. Claiming control over a country because it was once in the empire of a country who also conquered your own land is a bit of a dubious idea - the Iranians don't claim Athens just because Alexander the Great conquered both.
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Robbo, in parts I agree with you on how a gold medallist should carry the flag.
But Mark Foster has been to a fair few Olympics for Great Britain (I hate the saying Team GB to, why can't they just say Great Britain), and hes so experienced and all round good guy, so it was a good decision to choose him to carry the Union Jack.
I may be slightly biased on the subject seeing as i used to be a swimmer though :)
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