An Olympian rant

There's something strange going on in Beijing.

If you've followed the behind-the-scenes news stories about the atmosphere around the Olympics, you could be left with one of two pictures. Either the games are a huge success, proving that China is the future of the world - or there's a lot of empty seats, and aside from the volunteers, nobody in China seems to really care about the Olympics. So which is it?

My guess? Both.

I'm sure if you looked hard enough, you'd be able to find plenty of Chinese who don't care about the spectacle going on in their backyard. But at the same time, 1.3 billion Chinese watching the opening ceremony indicates that the vast majority do care.

The bigger problem is what's not being reported at all. Leading up to this summer, all the buildup seemed to be about how this would be China's coming-out party as an open society. No longer the same government that perpetrated the Tianamen Square massacre, we were told that China was the future socioeconomic powerhouse of the world, and these Olympics would prove it.

Instead, we got a tank positioned outside the press centre, people being denied access into the country for fear they might engage in peacful demonstration, all protests forced to be in one of three locations far away from the Olympic grounds, a British journalist arrested for simply visiting one of the three locations, and so on.

I don't expect this stuff to get covered on the Olympic broadcasts, and it wasn't - there were plenty of other stories for them to tell, from the dominance of Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt to the comeback story of Eric Lamaze. And I'll admit that I didn't watch as much news the last couple weeks as I usually do (due to work, vacation, and watching the Olympics)...but I saw virtually nothing on any of the above stories. They were sidebars at best. Doesn't seem right to me, it's almost like the news outlets were willing to ignore anything the Chinese government did in the interests of their feel-good story.

Unlike some people, though, I have no problem with the lip-synching nine-year-old and CGI fireworks from the opening ceremony. It's not like the Chinese are the first to try and pass off lip-synching as real.

And I like to laugh at people comparing China's medal dominance to Nazi Germany's attempt to do something similar in 1936. Of course it's the same thing - but so was the Greek effort in 2004, so will be the Brits in 2012. The host nation always puts in extra effort to have a good showing in the medal count, no matter what their political sytem is.

--Ryan