China takes Olympic Games to a new level, Beijing Olympics have transformed sporting landscape
Beijing 2008 Olympic Closing Ceremony Revealed: Intoxicating and flawless in their delivery, the Beijing Olympics have transformed the sporting landscape, perhaps forever.
Spectacular success: Beijing has raised the bar for staging the Olympics Photo:
Beijing 2008 Olympics Closing Ceremony
Over the last 16 days we have been enthralled by a spellbinding series of stories and achievements. From Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps to Britain’s Chris Hoy and Christine Ohuruogu, these Games will forever be remembered for the re-emergence of the sporting super hero.
For Team GB the last 16 days have been an unbelievable journey of discovery. From the moment Nicole Cooke started the gold rush on the roads around the Great Wall of China to James DeGale’s ugly but effective victory in the ring at the Workers’ Gymnasium, our best Olympics for a century has given the nation so much to be proud of.
Having delivered the aspirational target of fourth in the medal table four years early, British sport cannot now afford to relax as it enters the run-in to 2012. Finishing above China and America will never be achievable, but beating Russia is. Third place should become the aim for London in four years’ time.
For the hosts the Games have also been an overwhelming triumph. Not only did they win 15 more gold medals than America, they succeeded in showing the world the new, modern ‘brand China’. Athletes were carried on fleets of buses which ran like clockwork to and from the best village in the history of the Games to iconic venues where they produced some of the best performances of all time.
In total, 38 world records were produced in all sports, compared with 28 in Athens four years ago. In turn those epic performances were relayed to bigger audiences than ever before.
Setting aside the vast new audience in China – 843 million watched the opening ceremony alone – American broadcaster NBC experienced an 11 per cent increase in their average prime-time audiences during the Games. It has been a similar story in the UK, despite the timing being far less attractive.
Some 5.8 million people watched Bolt rewrite history in the 100 metres, two million stayed up to watch Paula Radcliffe’s agony in the women’s marathon while even 500,000 were awake at 3am to watch swimmer Rebecca Adlington win her second gold.
With so much good sport to focus on, those watching at home on TV won’t have got any sense of the underlying unease about China’s failure to deliver all its promises on human rights and media freedom which have been a running theme here. Nor will they have picked up on the concerns at the unknown price the Chinese people have really paid to ensure such an apparently flawless Games.
The IOC’s press briefings alongside the Beijing organisers, which started out as a daily event but quickly became every other day as relations soured, became a joke. Difficult questions about human rights, media and internet censorship and protests were batted away with non-answers, leaving the IOC looking compromised.
Unlike Sydney and Barcelona, it was also difficult to detect much of a party spirit in the Olympic city. Even after the finale to last night’s spectacular closing ceremony, Chinese spectators did not hit the town to carry on celebrating. They faded quietly and obediently into the night flanked by hundreds of police.
To describe it as soulless would be wrong, and much of it may be simply lost in translation, but London will undoubtedly be a more joyous experience four years from now.
So, with the flame extinguished and the flag passed to London, where has Beijing left the Olympic movement?
The Games desperately needed new icons to replace the sense of betrayal created by the drug scandals of the last few years. In Phelps and Bolt, Beijing created two of the greatest sport has seen.
At the same time, the statistics from the Games would seem to suggest a breakthrough in the fight against drugs. There have been just six positive tests returned from 4,500 samples collected. The full picture will not be known until later in the week, but initial evidence suggests the IOC’s crackdown on cheating is working.
If Bolt or Phelps – or any of our new British heroes for that matter – turn out to be anything other than the real deal then it might be a fatal blow.
On the grounds of sporting reasons alone, IOC members will believe that the gamble of taking the Games to China’s 1.3 billion people has paid off handsomely. But the big challenge for the Olympic movement remains the problem of making its unlikely mix of 28 sports (26 in London) relevant for the youth of the world.
In the emergence of an athlete like Bolt, they have been handed a golden opportunity to attract kids away from the internet. But IOC president Jacques Rogge scored a spectacular own goal when he criticised the Jamaican for elaborate celebrations. “I gave what I believe was fatherly advice,” he said as he reiterated his belief that Bolt should have shaken his opponents’ hands rather than his own backside.
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Big mistake. Bolt never overstepped the mark as the brash Americans did in Sydney in 2000 and never intended to be disrespectful to his rivals.
Furthermore, there is evidence from the early part of these Games which suggests the exploits of Bolt and Phelps did little to bring children back into the Olympic fold.
According to a survey by Advertising Age, the number of children aged between two and 11 watching the first 11 days of competition was exactly the same as the Athens Games. For teenagers the picture was worse with a four per cent drop.
The overall picture may change when figures are released for the whole event, but the need to change the programme for the 2016 Games to include more sports like BMX will become overwhelming.
Athletics also needs updating and over the next four years the International Association of Athletics Federations has vowed to look again at the way the sport is presented in time for London 2012.
After two weeks here, London’s organisers know there are many elements of Beijing’s Games they will never be able to emulate and nor would they want to. Up close they too will have seen Beijing’s flaws. But they also know they are inheriting a sporting festival which the Chinese have succeeded in taking to another level altogether.
Beijing 2008 Olympic Closing Ceremony Revealed: Intoxicating and flawless in their delivery, the Beijing Olympics have transformed the sporting landscape, perhaps forever.
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