Let’s go to bed

Here’s a quick post about a little joke that’s been going around China lately involving the Olympics. It requires a little setup. Whether you’re aware of it or not, Trampoline is one of the disciplines of Gymnastics in the competition. The Chinese for trampoline is bengchuang, where beng means jump, bounce or hop, and chuang means bed. Makes sense, as trampoline is kind of like bouncing on a big bed.

As it happens, Chinese athletes took three of the six possible medals in Trampoline, including both Men’s and Women’s Gold.

As we’re all aware, China suffered some disappointments in other sports, however.

So now they say here, “The Chinese may not be the best at running or cycling, but they’re good in bed.”

Keep on Running

To back up a bit from the previous post, I got to see the inside of the incredible Bird’s Nest on 20 August for a session of Athletics. I’ve already described the process of getting to the Olympic Green – it was the same this day as for when I went to Fencing. As we walked from the subway stop to the stadium, we passed by the set used by the Today Show, and since it was almost time for them to start their program (7pm local time, 7am New York time), we decided to skip the beginning of Athletics and watch.

The first thing we saw was a rehearsal of the routine the Hip-Hop Grandmas would be doing on the show.
This is a group of older Chinese women who have achieved internet fame by dancing to American hip-hop music, and being pretty good at it.

Given the chance to be on TV, even in a foreign country, will attract a crowd. Not a very large crowd in this case, but people do like to try to get their kids on TV.

Eventually the stars of the show arrived. Here’s Matt Lauer preparing for his work.
I don’t know if they showed it on NBC, but they have a pretty cool location.
We watched them do the first part of the show, then headed off to the Bird’s Nest.
Our seats were up on the third level, and this is how you get there.
There are a few elevators – somewhere. We didn’t see them. There are no escalators and no ramps, just a long hike up and up and up.

This is what it looked like from our seats.
That’s what you get for ¥200 a ticket (about US$28).

It’s kind of hard to tell at this distance, but the scoreboard on the far end (the only one we could see) displayed only Chinese. The one above and beside us (that we couldn’t see from our angle) showed the English. Seems like it would make sense to alternate the languages on both boards so everyone could read them, but apparently no one thought of that.

Sorry, no exciting action shots for this one. We were much too far away to see any details. The events we saw were Women’s Hammer, several preliminary heats of Men’s 800m and 5000m races, and a bit of Pole Vault way at the far end.
The only event we saw final results for was the Hammer, in which Aksana Miankova of Belarus set a new Olympic Record for the Gold, Yipsi Moreno of Cuba took Silver, and China’s Zhang Wenxiu took the Bronze, which pleased the crowd greatly.

Another highlight was in the first heat of the 5000m. This is a pretty long race, so as the laps went slowly by, most people were paying attention to the hammer throwing going on. But as it progressed one particular runner started catching people’s attention. Not the guy in the lead, but the guy at the very end. He was clearly out of the running, but courageously continued on, even after all the other runners lapped him. He finished more than a minute and a half behind the next best finisher, but got a huge cheer when he did. It wasn’t until after we got home that I looked up the results online and discovered it was Min Thu Soe of Myanmar.

Since there really wasn’t much to see, we left early, missing various other races, to check out the Green at night.
It was a warm night, so the fountains around the Water Cube were popular.
Back over on the Today Show set, they were wrapping up their final hour.
Note that Ann Curry has taken off her shoes. We watched her interview figure skater Michelle Kwan, who was in town as one of President Bush’s representatives for the Closing Ceremony.
By then it was getting kind of late, so we walked to the east exit of the Green and managed to find a taxi after maybe ten minutes. As we hadn’t eaten at all on the grounds, we were starving and headed for dinner.

Pretty much all pictures by D this time.

Drawn to the Rhythm

The last competition event (calendar-wise anyway) in my Olympic saga was Rhythmic Gymnastics, a sport I never really gave much thought to. I know it’s one of those sports that some hardliners consider not really a sport at all, but I’m not one for making boundaries.

This Rhythmic Gymnastics session was on 23 August at the Beijing University of Technology Gymnasium, which is in the southeast part of town. We got there by a combination of subway and taxi, since it is not within walking distance of a subway station and none of the shuttle buses had convenient routes for us.

For once I had really good seats, in the third row at one end of the gym. The competition was for individual medals, and almost all of the participants were from former Soviet Republics or satellite states: Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, and Russia. The only others were Spain and Israel.

The first competition was with the rope.
Next up was hoop.
Clubs (kind of like two juggling clubs) were third, and seemed to be the most difficult to master. Apparently difficult to photograph as well, since I ended up with no decent shots.

The ribbon was last, and is probably the most fun to watch.
Like I said, we had seats that were very close.
This is the Ukrainian Anna Bessonova, who ended up taking the Bronze, though she probably got the biggest crowd response of all for her ribbon routine.
Gold went to Evgeniya Kanaeva of Russia; Silver to Inna Zhukova of Belarus.

To continue the saga of difficulties getting out of Olympic venues, the BUT gym was no exception. There were helpful signs at the sidewalk that told us the shuttle buses were to the right and taxis 100m to the left. We walked to the left more than a hundred meters and found no taxis that would stop – several empty ones passed by us and the rest of the crowd, apparently on important missions. After waiting about 20 minutes with no luck, we decided maybe the shuttle bus wasn’t a bad idea. One of the routes at least took us to a subway station. On the bus we met a woman and a girl from Portland, Oregon. The girl is involved in Rhythmic Gymnastics and they told us their horror story about buying tickets from a company that disappeared before they had tickets in hand, leaving them in Beijing hoping to buy from scalpers. At least they had bought the originals with a credit card, so they should be able to recover their money. After we got off the bus, we easily found a taxi for the trip home.

All in all, this was probably the most enjoyable session of them all, and I have a new appreciation for this sport. Maybe in London we’ll be watching an American from Portland whom I met, sort of.

Some pictures by me, some by D.

Gimme Shelter

Another Olympic session I attended was on 21 August at Workers Stadium, which is an easy walk from where I live. It was the two final games of Women’s Football. D and I walked up to Sanlitun for a meal before the matches, then walked to the North Gate of the Stadium, where a number of restaurants and clubs with prime locations were closed for the duration. All of them were actually outside the security fence, but were apparently considered to risky to allow open while events were going on.

It was a drizzly day, so we both had umbrellas. Mine folded down to a small size, but D’s Olympic mascot umbrella was too long, so we ended up going back out and taking it home. We did see people inside with full-length umbrellas, so it seems the security rule was inconsistently applied.

The second time round security was just fine, and we found ourselves in the wonderful confines of Workers Stadium. This is one of the old facilities that was “remodeled” for the Olympics, but it’s still pretty much an outdated pile of junk. It has no covered concourses, so all of the concession stands and entrances to restrooms are exposed to the elements. The rows are rather steeply pitched and much too close together for comfortable passing, a fact which is made worse by the size of the sections. They’re about 40 seats wide and only have an aisle on one side – the other side has a railing to separate it from the next section. Approximately every minute and a half throughout the whole evening we had to stand up to let someone pass. No one in our row seemed capable of simply watching the game. They had to take the kids out, get some refreshments or whatever.
First up was some entertainment from a Cheer Squad (or whatever they prefer to be called). Gotta love the outfits for this routine.
Yes, they’re wearing cat ears, and you can’t tell from this shot, but they have tails too.
I found a video of them on Youtoube:

After a while they were joined by a bunch of Fuwa and dancers in other outfits. Towards the end of the routine, Beibei (the blue one) started deflating and had to be rushed off for medical attention.

The Bronze Medal match was between Germany and Japan.
Ever since the Women’s World Cup last year, I’ve kind of had a grudge against Germany, and was really glad when Brazil beat them here in the Olympics, reversing the result of last year’s title match. That, plus my general love of most things Japanese, and I was rooting for the women in blue. They started out very strong, dominating the play in the first half and narrowly missing some scoring opportunities. Germany just couldn’t pull it together.

We noticed that as the game progressed, the Chinese crowd grew more and more partisan, booing loudly every time Japan so much as touched the ball, and cheering when Germany had the ball. I don’t know if that had any impact on the outcome, but while Japan continued to play solidly, Germany got a couple of lucky breaks and managed to score twice, taking the Bronze.

In between matches, more dance routines and mascots:
A flag squad came out, and at first I thought it was just the presentation of the colors for the Gold Medal match.
But they did a pretty elaborate choreographed routine with the American and Brazilian flags, along with some Olympic flags. You can see how wet it was – I felt sorry for the dancers whose moves put them onto the ground.

The match was pretty even, finishing scoreless at the half.
At the half we had dirt-bike races on the field for entertainment.
The remaining regular time also went scoreless.
To be honest (call me un-American if you like), but by the time we went into the two 15-minute overtime periods, I would have been happy to see either team score. As it was, the US did, taking the Gold.

For once, getting out of a venue and home was a breeze, though it looked like those who didn’t live within walking distance may have had more of a challenge, as Gongti Beilu (the street on the north side of the stadium) was jammed solid with cars, buses and taxis as far as we could see in both directions.

Rain, rain

My Olympic experience number three was Canoe/Kayak Slalom on 14 August. The day started out kind of damp and dreary. After a half day at the office, I met a coworker on her day off at a restaurant near Dongzhimen Station, where we had lunch before heading out to Shunyi. After eating, we hopped on the subway to get to a place where the Shunyi Olympic bus stops.

When we came out of the subway station, it was raining moderately hard, and we walked the couple blocks to the bus stop under an umbrella. Luckily we didn’t have to wait long until two buses arrived. We got on the least crowded one (we still had to stand the entire way). It takes more than an hour to get out to the Shunyi Rowing/Canoeing Centre, and it rained the entire time.

Security was pretty smooth, and they were handing out plastic raincoats just inside the gate. We grabbed a couple and made the long walk to the section where our seats were.
Almost everyone was sensibly crowded into the top half of the stands under the canopy.

The moderate rain continued through the first heat of the day, which was Men’s Two-Man Kayak.
They start in the upper right and go around clockwise. They have to pass through a series of gates, and the ones that are red have to be done backwards.
Luckily for the athletes, the rain had no impact on their performances.
After that heat finished, we had a half hour or so before the next scheduled one. The rain was coming down much harder now, and in a little while, we started seeing flashes in the sky.
After a few more announced delays as the weather continued to refuse improvement, they finally announced the cancellation of the next race. We hurried for the exit along with everyone else.
With the sudden exodus of the entire crowd, the bus system was overwhelmed. It seemed that they made no modification of the normal transportation plan to handle the changed circumstances. Each of the two bus routes had a waiting place, and people loaded onto the buses from the front of the line. The buses arrived at the whitewater area after coming from the rowing area, so they were already pretty full when they arrived. A handful of people would squeeze in, the bus would take off, and we’d wait for the next one, which was also near capacity. They brought up a couple of big empty buses, but they parked at the back and waited for all the full ones to go first. A few people got frustrated and started yelling and trying to cut in line, but police and Olympic volunteers mostly prevented that. After a long time standing in the rain, we finally got seats and headed for town. I’ll just say it was a very inefficient way to handle the situation, but it seems they had their procedure and they stuck to it.

From what I hear, we had it pretty easy compared to some of the Tennis fans, who got herded into a waiting area, unable to get in or out, and without any facilities or free raincoats while they waited to find out if the matches would happen or not.

Get on the fence

I’ve been interested in fencing for a long time. I even took it as an elective PE course in college for a couple of quarters. That, combined with the fact that Olympic Fencing tickets are not terribly expensive, prompted me to buy a couple of them and take a friend. I sent her a couple of Wikipedia links to get her started, since she knew nothing about the sport. With the recent success of the American women in the sport, maybe more people in the US will start paying attention to it.

Taking a lesson from my Beach Volleyball experience, we had a big early dinner at a restaurant near my office, then took the subway to the Olympic Green. Beitucheng is the closest stop of the regular subway system. You have to go outside and through a security checkpoint where they scan your ticket to get onto Line 8, the “Olympic Spur” line.

The Olympic Green station puts you right in the middle of the sponsor pavilions.
The Samsung stage had a series of performers of different kinds.
Incidentally, the CNPC (China National Petroleum Company) building is an example of Green Architecture.
Really Green Architecture.

The Spectator Guide said that due to the fencers’ heavy padding, the Fencing Hall is kept at a very cool temperature, so I decided that I’d like to swing by an Olympic gear store and buy a jacket. As it turned out, the nearest place to buy stuff was about a half mile away, past the China Mobile and Volkswagen buildings.
You can kind of see it in that picture. It’s the red spot past the second traffic light. Not the first red spot, the second one.

We had to wait in line to enter the Olympic Super Store, which is really big.
And it turned out they only had one style of jacket and were completely out of it, so the long walk was for nothing. At least we got to see a little of the lay of the land. Every once in a while we saw a little electric shuttle go by, but there were no signs about them and we couldn’t tell if they were for public use or just staff and VIPs. We hiked all the way back to the Fencing Hall, where we had already missed a couple of matches.

The seats we had were very nearly the worst possible seats in the place, close to the side wall where you can’t even see the video screen, and with a really steep angle to view the strip.
But as it was a typical Beijing “sold out” event, we simply sat in some better seats in our section.

The first one we saw was Women’s Épée Semifinal, with Li Na of China against Britta Heidemann of Germany.
Heidemann (far side) won 15-13. During the break we moved to somewhat better seats.

Next up was the other Women’s Épée Semifinal, Hungary’s Ildiko Mincza-Nebald taking on Roumanian Ana Maria Branza.
Like I said, better seats. Branza (near side) got the win 15-14.

Then it was time for the Men’s Foil Bronze Medal match, with Zhu Jun of China and Salvatore Sanzo from Italy, which we saw from seats that were slightly better still. I could swear I took some pictures of this bout, but they don’t seem to be on the memory card. Zhu had a tough time of it, trailing for much of the bout, catching up for a while, and then losing 14-15. Italy takes the Bronze.

The Men’s Foil Gold Medal match was next. The German Benjamin Philip Kleibrink vs. Ota Yuki of Japan.
Ota (near side) never had a chance, and while I found Kleibrink’s style abrasive, I must admit he was the better swordsman. He loves to get in tight spots and then whip the foil behind his back so it bends and gets the touch on some unexpected part of the opponent.
The final matches were the Women’s Épée medal bouts. For the Bronze, Li Na got off to a good start against Ildiko Mincza-Nebold, holding the lead at the ends of the first two rounds, but didn’t get a single touch in the third round to the Hungarian’s six.

A heart-breaking loss for the home team.

The women’s championship bout, of course, pitted Britta Heidemann (far side) and Ana Maria Branza against each other.
This one was a one-sided rout leading to another German Gold.

Having never seen one in person, we hung round for the medal ceremonies, which happened after some entertainment featuring Chinese sword dancers.

The ceremony was kinda cool.
Then we got some acrobatic fuwa while they prepared for the women’s ceremony.
I think Jingjing was trying a break dancing move and couldn’t get up.
By that time it was 10:30, and out on the Olympic Green, the fancy new buildings were all lit up.
Pretty nifty, huh?

And, like my previous Olympic experience, this one ends with a rant. Just as at Chaoyang Park for Beach Volleyball, the Olympic Green is much easier to get into than out of. By the time we finished taking pictures and gawking at things, it was after 11, and the subway was closed. There was no sign to tell you that, but the escalator going down was turned off and the lights were out. We walked to the bus stop, but all the signs said the lines stopped running at 11. So we, along with a hundred other people, set out to find taxis in a part of town where there are very few to be found. We had to walk quite a way and wait a long time before we found one. I’ve checked the schedule, and there are a lot of events that don’t finish until after 11, so why the subway stops running then is beyond me. And if they’re going to do asinine things like that, they should at least put up signs informing you of it, and offering alternatives. But propaganda, not information, is what these Olympics are about.

I suppose the food situation is a little better at Olympic Green than it was at Chaoyang Park, as there are a couple of giant McDonalds locations on site, so as long as you like that or microwave popcorn, you could practically live there.

Of course, the merchandise situation is difficult, with tiny booths inside the venue and one mega store a long distance from anything else. It’s like they really don’t want you to spend your money.

Incidentally, we had heard about the Olympic Green Day Pass, which will allow people without event tickets to at least come and see the cool buildings. However, the volunteer we asked about it could only suggest that they were available at a booth inside the grounds, which doesn’t seem very practical. How very typical that they would offer something like that but provide no information about where or how to get it.

Okay, that’s my rant for Olympic Day 2. Wait till you hear the next one. Yes, I’m sorry to say, there is a next one coming.