The morning of Friday, August 15th, was one of unaccustomed freshness in Beijing, and it brought forth two objects, both wreathed in legend but hitherto hard to spot. The first was a boiling ball of gases some ninety-three million miles away, known as the sun. The second was the sprinter Usain Bolt, whose homeland lies more than eight thousand miles away, in Jamaica, but who was now a hundred and thirty metres from where I sat. I was close to the finish line of the hundred-metre track, and he was at the start, awaiting his first heat of the Games, and going through his pre-race routine: glancing to the heavens and beating a brief tattoo, with his index fingers, on an invisible drum. He shimmied on the spot, revving his muscles, as all athletes like to do—the most febrile being Rafael Nadal, the young minotaur of the tennis circuit, who hops up and down, before every match, like a small boy in need of a pee. Bolt’s nerves were less twitchy than that. Indeed, from this first heat up to the final, the following night, he seemed to be participating less in an Olympic sport than in a gargantuan party, which happened to have a sporting theme. My deepest fear was that he would break the world record and then test positive for rum and Coke.
In the end, come the final, he elected not to break the record so much as snap it like a bread stick. The clock stopped at 9.69, three-hundredths of a second faster than his previous record, set in New York earlier this year. To a sprinter, that is a gulf, and what was plain, to the bedazzled throng, was that he could widen it at will. Bolt is lofty for his sport, at six feet five (at first glance, you would tag him as a four-hundred-metre man), and he takes a while to get upright from the set position, but, once his stride is established, he is free to mold the rest of the contest into a monarchical stroll. In Beijing, reaction times—the getaway speed of a runner, measured from the crack of the pistol—flash up on the stadium screens, and they showed that Bolt the finalist had been sluggish off the blocks. What is more, after eighty-five metres he was already so far ahead of his peers, and so convinced of victory, that he swept his arms back like airplane wings, which must have slowed him down, and then, as a pièce de résistance, thumped his chest—a single clap of the right palm to the heart—before he crossed the line. So here’s the deal: once Usain Bolt gets a decent start, and if he can be bothered to finish properly, with a dip of the neck and no showboating, he might turn out pretty quick.
All of this provoked an instant debate. Was he not under obligation, given the occasion, to travel as fast as he could—get serious out there, before a watching world, and wrestle the record down to something superhuman, around the 9.60 mark? The opposing view was that, heck, if you can’t have a personal parade in the Olympics, when can you? Bolt set a new record anyway, and thus laid down another threshold that he will cross when he pleases, at some grim-faced meet in Qatar or Gothenburg. For the moment, he was like Russell Crowe in “Gladiator,” killing off the competition and then heating the blood of the masses with a taunting, rhetorical cry: “Are you not entertained?” We were amused, for sure. The obvious reaction, to such a spectacle of dominance, was not to marvel but to laugh. After all, Bolt’s domination was an innocent one, shod in golden sneakers and purged of ill will, and to witness it in a land where mastery is not always so benign, and where the government is unlikely to be entertained by any spirits who try to run free, felt like a blessing and a mischievous joke.
The long day closed, in other words, on a mirror image of its beginning. The first heroes to enter the stadium, that morning, had been the leaders of the twenty-kilometre walk, an event considered hilarious by everyone on planet Earth except the athletes themselves. Somehow, wordlessly, a deal has been agreed on: we will not giggle, for politeness’s sake, and they will continue to propel themselves, year in, year out, as if learning to moonwalk too soon after a hip replacement. Yet mockery was stilled, for a minute, by the haunted eyes of the winner, the Russian Valeriy Borchin, as he stood on the podium later, his gauntness telling of the mortification that had led him to this point; he clutched his medal and his bunch of flowers as if emerging from a cloistral seminary into the light.
Again and again, the visitor to the games was taken aback (as friends who stayed home, with their TV remotes, could never be) by this clash of tones, the comedy of sport crunching up against the obsessiveness—not to mention the fitness—that drives its devotees. I could make out little of the men’s shot put on Friday night, for instance, not because it was half a stadium away but because, even through binoculars, it appeared to be an international convention of bartenders, staged inside a cloud of talcum powder. This, or something similar, is what your shot-putter daubs onto his neck, from earlobe to shoulder, before hefting the ball and tucking it into position. Reese Hoffa, the United States Olympic trials champion, used more of the stuff than anyone since Diana Vreeland. The Americans had been billed, or overbilled, to run rampant. “I would love to be the class of Olympic athletes to sweep,” Hoffa said. In the end, he fell short, his countryman Adam Nelson landed not a single shot in bounds, and it was left to the hedge-bearded Christian Cantwell, from Columbia, Missouri, to grab the silver. The gold went to the Pole Tomasz Majewski, and his magic bandanna, and for the first time I understood the binary appeal of the discipline: the brute thrust of Majewski’s firing arm, uncrooked and locked, versus the delicate skip of his swivelling feet below. If the U.S. wants to do better in London, four years from now, it had better start sending some bison to ballet school.
The best thing about the shot put was the cars. After the shot landed, and the distance had been measured, the precious sphere would be retrieved by an official and placed in the cockpit of an automobile: two feet long, bright red, with a tail fin—in short, the idealized vehicle that I drew during chemistry lessons when I was nine years old. Now it exists, for real, and there are two Chinese fellows with the best job in the world, who get to steer it back to the shot-putting circle by remote control. (It can also bring a hammer, or even a javelin, which slots neatly into the fin.) I followed the gaze of the spectators around me, and realized that most of them had entirely lost interest in what was happening on the track, so urgently were they tracing the progress of the cars, and so hastily were they revising their list of what they want for Christmas. One question, though, will linger after the Games are done. The red supercars are equipped with windshields, but why? Who needs to see out? Are there tiny drivers tucked in there, bred specially for the event?
There are some sports, sadly, that are doomed to stay irredeemable—in which the skills required, however towering, cannot hope to emerge from the smog of absurdity. Synchronized swimming, it is universally agreed, presents too inviting a target. Long before this year’s competition began, on August 10th, I was lost in the arcana of the American press handout, which explained that the stuff the swimmers rub into their hair, to keep it helmet-hard and out of their smiles as they cavort, is unflavored Knox gelatin, “also used in Jell-O and cheesecake.” The main ingredient of Knox is “soft horse cartilage.” Add the Knox to the nose clips that the women affix, for those tricky submarine somersaults, and you get an unsavory blend of sport, cooking class, and circus.
No less ambivalent is the status of handball, in which teams—there is no getting around this—try to throw a ball into a net. If the net were in a hoop, above their heads, the game would demand a frictionless flexibility and pace, and the results would bring in hundreds of millions of dollars. Turn the net into a goal, however, tack it to the floor, and for some reason the appeal tends to wilt. In contrast to modern pentathlon, whose five segments—shooting, fencing, swimming, riding, and running—were proposed by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founding genius of today’s Olympic Games, and based upon the experience of a cavalry soldier caught behind enemy lines, handball is based upon the experience of a management trainee with a ball of paper and a trash basket on the other side of the cubicle. I watched Spain against China, a tense affair, and scarcely noticed the score, so entranced was I that the Spanish goalkeeper had come to the game in his pajamas—soft, stretchy yellow ones with red piping, and a crisscross of matching yellow ribbon on his sure-grip slippers. He was the Malvolio of handball, his name was José Javier Hombrados, and he steered his team to a snug 36–22 victory—insured, I like to think, by the actions of his colleague Iker Romero, who crossed himself twice as he ran onto the court. How much divine protection, exactly, does one need for a game of handball?
Local support, needless to say, was pitched somewhere between the dutifully zealous and the ecstatic. There was one Chinese player, a close-cropped imp named Zhu Wenxin, whose pleasure was to whirl his arm before hurling a penalty throw, and his supporters reacted with the fervor of medieval flagellants. The English-speaking announcer fanned the mania, labelling him “Three-Sixty Master,” and what pen could describe the thrill of seeing Three-Sixty Master facing off against Pajama Boy? I sat either amid or alongside Chinese crowds at field hockey, weight lifting, fencing, tennis, table tennis, and water polo, and, for every skeptical moment at which their eagerness felt like a fix, or a pressurized public service, there were half a dozen when the howling seemed no less honest, thunderous, and partial than it would at an N.F.L. game, or at a soccer match in the British Premier League. There were reams of supporters at the hockey game, against South Korea, who had clearly been bused in to fill the seats, their yellow T-shirts bearing the words “Cheering from Beijing Workers.” Yet the buzz of the match was unfakably contagious, and, when China opened the scoring, after five minutes, even bewildered novices caught the mood, dizzy at the thought of vanquishing South Korea. I turned to the woman next to me, who had introduced herself as a Chinese-Korean interpreter. What was the current state of political relations between the two countries? “Very nice,” she said, and that was that.
Some of the sporting nuances were almost too fine to unpick. According to my neighbor, the Chinese cheerleaders at halftime had been coached in the niceties of the rah-rah by a South Korean. Where else but at the Olympics—whose motto reads “One World One Dream”—would you get this kind of deal? Likewise, the roars for Japan against Germany in team table tennis sounded a little excessive to me, until it was explained that one of the Japanese players, Kan Yo, was Chinese-born. Most disconcerting of all was the noise I heard behind me at eight o’clock on the night of August 14th: a sob of grief, the one thing that is never lost in translation. I turned around and found a volunteer—one of the hundred thousand young Chinese who gave their services to the Games, and who were its best and most likable asset. Their good cheer rarely dimmed, and this was the first volunteer I had seen in tears. I put an arm around her shoulders, risking a diplomatic incident, and asked what the matter was. “My name is Tian Xueping,” she said, bravely maintaining the required standard of English, “and I am so sad.” I asked if I could help in any way. “I want them to win this game in our country.” So that was it. “It is just a game, but so sad,” she added. Now I understood, and I knew there was nothing I could do. And it wasn’t just a game. It was fencing.
As Olympic endeavors go, fencing is kind of perfect. It has the sting of the new—the minor sport with a major place in history, a satisfyingly dense array of rules and dexterities, and yet, for all that, an aim that seems piercingly simple. This is a far cry from tennis, say, whose blueprint is in our brains, and which feels muffled and stranded at the Olympics. I saw Nadal play a set, and a listless Roger Federer do the same (two days later, he lost), and then drifted away. Tennis carries with it such a halo of big money, and the players are so starkly defined by their individual gifts, that it’s hard to rethink it, for eight days, as an Olympic team game, ablaze with amateur good will. Hero worship, for all but a handful of Olympians, is the fleeting exception, whereas for tennis stars it’s the rule. Nadal, to his credit, looked delighted when he won the gold medal, but, as he tossed his wristbands to his fans, you could see, in their outstretched hands, a craving that no Olympics could ever sate: bring me the sweat of Rafael Nadal.
Things were different on August 9th, when I dropped idly into the Fencing Hall at seven in the evening, steeped in total ignorance, to take a look. At two o’clock in the morning, still shaken by what I had seen, I was downing gins and vodkas with the coaches of the U.S. team and drinking in their wisdom. Luck had been on my side: that night, American female fencers had done what the shot-putting guys could only talk of, and won a clean sweep. Gold in the individual women’s sabre had gone to Mariel Zagunis, of Portland, Oregon; silver to Sada Jacobson, of Dunwoody, Georgia; and bronze to Rebecca Ward, also of Portland. Zagunis had repeated her triumph of four years ago, in Athens, and Jacobson had risen one place. Ward was the baby of the squad, only eighteen, and heading to Duke University in the fall, although by the time she left the hall that Saturday night, she no longer looked like a kid. She looked like a grownup.
The turning point can be pinned down precisely. It came after Ward lost her semifinal to Zagunis. Like many Olympic events, fencing is such a small world that you regularly, and unavoidably, compete against friends—in this case, friends beside whom you will later fight in the team event. This lends a taut and unbreathable air to the contest. If the scoring is close, then so is the atmosphere, near-stormy with complicated feelings. David Jacobson, the father of Sada, and an endocrinologist by profession, told me of the “huge emotional swings” that the sport entails—“You have to temper the highs as well as the lows,” he said. I went down to the mixed zone, the jungly gauntlet of reporters that athletes in every sport must run immediately after their events, and saw the defeated Ward pass through. To put a question would have been inhuman, and she wouldn’t have heard, anyway, so immured was she in her fortress of desolation. The natural high color of her face was deepened with perspiration and laved in tears; she looked like a woman ready to call a cab to the airport. Instead of which, she composed herself, walked out twenty minutes later for the bronze-medal playoff against the Russian Sofiya Velikaya, went 1–6 down, composed herself again, overhauled her opponent, and won the match, 15–14. How she did this I have no idea.
The profile of U.S. fencing is hard to gauge—that night won’t have harmed it, and all three medallists were on the “Today” show the next morning—but, full face, it has got a whole lot better. The fencers now use a transparent visor where there was once a mesh mask, and their intensity is clear to see. Indeed, there were times, during the American bouts, with the auditorium in darkness and the only light falling on the strip (the slender runway up and down which the fencers charge and retreat), when I felt more like a theatregoer, rapt and aghast, than like an ordinary sports fan. The sabre has the edge, literally, on the épée and the foil; hits from those are administered with the point, whereas the sabre-rattler can score with a slice of her cutting edge or the flat back of the blade. As a viewer, you get a lot more slash-and-clash for your money, which has to be a good thing, and if, mid-bout, you had presented Sada Jacobson with a staircase, a chandelier, and a black-clad Basil Rathbone she could probably have coped with them, too.
David Jacobson was a fencer at Yale, and made the national squad in 1974. His wife, Tina, still fences, and said proudly of Sada, “She’s doing it for America, and I’m doing it so I don’t get osteoporosis.” All three of her daughters—she also has Emily, twenty-three, and Jackie, nineteen—have been world champions at some stage. Then it’s in the genes, right? David Jacobson shook his head, and pointed: “Arkady,” he said. Arkady Burdan, the coach of the Jacobson clan and one of five coaches of the U.S. Olympic team, is a squat, unstoppable bullet of a man, heavy-shouldered and smooth-skulled, like two Alan Arkins mashed together. He is sixty-four years old, born in Uzbekistan, but brought up in Odessa, on the Black Sea. He came to America in 1990, and he will tell you what fencing is. “Is physical chess,” he told me, using his cigar like a short, fat épée to ram home the point. “Without coach, is nothing.” I saw him at strip-side, that Saturday, and again the following Thursday, when the same three Americans fenced as a team and took bronze. As each assumed her position, en garde, he sat gazing down, as though brooding in prayer, all but unable to watch. Halfway through one of Sada Jacobson’s individual bouts, when she was slipping against Velikaya, she took time out—there is a compulsory pause when one of the contestants reaches eight points—and came across to Burdan for advice. A few words, a hand on her arm, and back she went, transfigured and cooled, and wrapped the match up, 15–11. With coach, is everything. Later, over drinks, I asked Burdan what secrets he had confided in the gloom. “She look so tight,” he told me. “She look she do some hard, terrible job.” Did he discuss strategy, a way to strike back into the game? “I not call her technicals, no. I tell her, create fencing—her fencing. I say, have fun. Play.”
The way of Burdan is not, of course, the only way. There is also the Marcia Lyon way. I spoke with her son, Jay Lyon, of Canada, after he had held his nerve and taken two matches, one on the heels of the other, on the Archery Field. His first victim had been Xue Hai Feng, of China, who was ranked No. 18 at the games, twenty-nine places above Lyon, so it was quite a scalp, and he had then seen off Brady Ellison, of the United States. What was boosting him that day? “Sweet little e-mail from my mom. She said, no matter what, the sun’s still going to come up tomorrow.” Mrs. Lyon was clearly not in Beijing, where the chances of that were around fifty-fifty. “And, if I don’t do well, she’s going to kick my ass,” he added, lovingly. The other mystery weapon in Lyon’s quiver was Phil Towle, a performance coach back in the States, whose online messages had been an inspiration. “He’s also been a psychologist for Metallica,” Ryan said, as if to justify the gentleman. I had to steady myself against a passing volunteer. Metallica has a psychologist? What, exactly, is it repressing in its sylvan melodies?
The urge to play at the Olympic Games is not restricted to the athletes. As an onlooker, too, you want the kickass performance, but you also want some fun, and that was the problem for Beijing. Nobody could knock the transport system, with its humming fleet of electric buses, or the facilities at every venue; and yet, despite this formidable organization—or perhaps as its inevitable result—the enterprise, as a whole, was beset by a looming lack of joy. This was not really the fault of the Chinese; it may simply indicate a design flaw inherent in the Olympics themselves, which have grown so vast and unwieldy that the only way to run them successfully may be as a kind of mini-China, packaged and policed to a fault. Sports addicts and journalists alike were faced with a paradox: the more you got to see, the less of a blast it was. At noon every day, as I stumbled across the asphalt from one shuttle bus to another, my lunch, in the form of a Snickers bar, already softening in my pocket, the sensation of being a lost soul was overwhelming. Around me stretched the gray acres of the Olympic Green, its title being the closest thing that the Chinese authorities have come to irony, and within me was a memory of Fabrizio del Dongo. Readers of Stendhal’s “The Charterhouse of Parma” will know Fabrizio as the hapless hero, whose experience of Napoleonic combat does not come off quite as splendidly as planned. “Was what he had seen a battle,” Stendhal writes, “and secondly, was that battle Waterloo?”
In the same way, I am confident that I attended the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, in 2008; but I cannot truly say whether I went to China, and, if so, whether the city I lived in for a fortnight was Beijing. My hotel, miles away on an outer ring road, was like a silent, fortified compound for the criminally insane; it had no bar, though it did, in a slightly unwise nod to the Games, have an indoor archery range. I had a go, late one night, and almost shot myself in the foot; where were you, Phil Towle, just when I needed you most? I never made it out of town, to the soccer in Shanghai, the sailing in Qingdao, or the equestrian events in Hong Kong. (That seems a long trip, but the riders for the Melbourne Games, in 1956, didn’t compete in Melbourne at all. They competed in Stockholm. And, anyway, if you were a horse this year, would you really want to fly to Beijing, knowing that at any moment a synchronized swimmer might steal your soft cartilage and use it as hair gel?) The fact is that the Olympic Games could happen anywhere. They seem to unfold in a vast and spotless nowhere. I could have been in Melbourne, or Toronto, where at least the food would have been better—where the Chinese food would have been better. The organizers, inexplicably, built no respectable restaurants or enticing stores within the zone; the concession stands were best avoided, being barely any different from what you get at Loews before a movie. So bananas and water it had to be, as one sat for five hours in the National Stadium, on a windless night, and watched the women heptathletes. Still, by the look of them, they hadn’t eaten anything since a small Greek salad at the Athens Games, in 2004, so I guess we were all in the same boat.
The Chinese took these women to their hearts. Few events are more consuming than the heptathlon, which lasts two whole days. The athletes collapsed on the track at the end, after the eight hundred metres, with the Greek holding an ice pack to the neck of her French rival. Gathering their strength, they rose and linked hands to form a sisterly chorus line, taking a bow down the back straight, and the crowd went crazy. This prompted the thought, Was there something different in the massed exclamations of the second week? The locals had crowed over the opening ceremony, as it brandished the image of a potent China abroad, and that throb of entitlement had endured through the rest of the opening week, with its plethora of indoor events—badminton, gymnastics, diving, and other strongholds of the Chinese. An acquaintance who has lived in Beijing for five years says that, in his opinion, they have no notion of the underdog (why cheer anyone but a winner?), and the first week of the games had proved his point. Now we were outside, in the open air, and the People’s Republic was having to learn to lose. The overdog of the hundred-and-ten-metre hurdles, Liu Xiang, limped off before he had even begun, a disaster only slightly less traumatic for his country—not to mention for Visa, Coca-Cola, and Nike—than the loss of India was for the British Empire. More measured was the response to Hu Kai, a funky and bespectacled hundred-metre sprinter, who came in last in his second heat, yet earned a surge of sympathetic acclaim. Heaven knows, it takes more than a fortnight to melt a national mood, but it could just be that the most telling figure at the games, for the Chinese, was not their champion weight lifter Cao Lei, who started where the other lifters left off, but someone like their steeplechaser Zhao Yanni—outpaced, shattered, but unbowed as she flopped across the finish. If she is ostracized, of course, and banished to a Snickers factory for the next twenty years, we’ll know that nothing has changed.
“The Olympic victor, I said, is deemed happy in receiving a part only of the blessedness which is secured to our citizens, who have won a more glorious victory and have a more complete maintenance at the public cost. For the victory which they have won is the salvation of the whole State.” Thus Socrates says to Glaucon, in the fifth book of the Republic. Plato, one of the great wrestling philosophers, could be describing the official Chinese attitude to these Games, wherein the individual is swallowed up by the team performance of a nation. On the other hand, the one aspect of victory that Plato could not have foreseen is the television camera, which, in its sentimental aggression, has made the masses anything but faceless. Does our behavior change when we find ourselves being watched? I looked at the badminton winner, Zhang Ning, when she stood to receive her medal; as the tears fell, the camera crept in close. That focus, like the double air-punch—or, indeed, like the screams of the fabulous fencer Ni Hong, who celebrated almost every hit with an uninhibited yowl, crouching down and going, “Yeaah! Yeaah! Yeaah!”—is a pure invention of the wicked West, plundered by China for its own state-sponsored highs. Ni, at such moments, seemed less Chinese than any Chinese person I have ever seen; she looked, if anything, like a Beatles groupie in the final number of “A Hard Day’s Night.”
China has taken the gamble of seeking to make people rich before it has made them free. By the standards of the Enlightenment, that is either an illusion or a cruel con, though a free marketeer might argue that the liberties bestowed by trade and consumption—the strange half-freedom of the television commercial, for example, which enslaves us even as it promises the wealth of the world—are not to be sniffed at, and may, indeed, be what most of us ponder and pursue. (We shouldn’t worry more about the price of gas than about human rights in China, but we do.) As I dined, one day, on a Big Mac in a thunderstorm, seeking and failing to find refuge in a packed McDonald’s beside the Olympic Green subway station, I heard the Olympic theme song, playing on a tape loop inside, and watched a Chinese teen-ager in the doorway. She sucked on her milkshake and then sang along, swaying; she was, at once, everything that the capitalist corporation could hope for, and everything that the Communist Party had planned. I tried to talk to her, but she spoke no English; besides, what young person wants to be asked if he or she feels free? What kind of question is that? I thought of the sign I had seen on the first full day of the Games, in the Forbidden City, as I headed back from the cycling. “Hall of Earthly Tranquillity,” it read, and then, at the bottom, in smaller letters, “Made Possible by the American Express Company.” One world. One dream.
