We’re here, where’s the torch?

We arrived. For a long time it looked like we wouldn’t, but on Monday morning, four days after leaving Beijing, 11 foreign journalists arrived at the media centre on the lower slopes of Mount Everest to report on the torch relay.

It brought to an end two of weeks of uncertainty that started when a briefing was cancelled and we heard nothing more until we were summoned to the Beijing Olympic media centre on the morning of our scheduled departure. The party of foreign media, at this stage 20-strong, was informed that bad weather had caused a delay to our journey and the departure ceremony for the climb team and torch had been cancelled.

Little did we know, although we might have guessed, that the Tibet Autonomous Region did not want foreign journalists poking around the still sensitive sores of the March riots. It took pressure from the central government, we have now learned, for them to finally allow us to go.

But the lost days meant we would be going from 54 metres above sea level in Beijing to Everest Base Camp (5,200m) in just three days – something that rang serious alarm bells with the doctors we consulted. “I would strongly advise against it,” said one British doctor, an expert on high altitude sickness who reached the summit of Everest last year. “You’re putting yourself in a position where you could get something that could kill you.”

There followed three days of back and forth with deadlines missed and pushed back, meetings in cafes, stand-offs, stand-downs, demands for money, demands for information and a BOCOG employee being chased down the street by reporters trying to stuff wads of cash into his hands.

Chinese security personnel watch from their observation post in front of the peak of Mount Everest, also known as Qomolangma, near Everest Base Camp April 28, 2008. A small group of foreign reporters have been allowed into the region to witness the Olympic torch ascend Everest. REUTERS/David Gray (CHINA)

Picking my way through chaotic traffic, dust and unmade footpaths on my way to the Bird’s Nest stadium this morning, I had a flashback to the Olympic Stadium in Athens four years ago.

The difference was that when I was stumbling through the debris in Greece, it was just a few days before the Games rather than the 114 days that remain before the Opening Ceremony here in China.

Almost lost among the thousands of words written about the torch relay during the International Olympic Committee’s visit to Beijing last week were continual statements of confidence that the athletes were going to experience a top class Games this summer with facilities that few would have seen the like of before.   

If the Bird’s Nest is anything to go by, that assessment may not be far off the mark.

Forget the aesthetics of the twisted steel exterior, from the inside it simply looks like it’s going to be a superb arena for the world’s greatest athletes to strut their stuff.

I first really caught the sporting bug when, at a tender age, I first walked into the maelstrom of a stadium packed with thousands of spectators. In my case it was an English football stadium, but friends have spoken of similar formative experiences at baseball, rugby and cricket grounds.

That feeling of awe and delicious expectation remains with me and I felt a small twinge of it when I first glimpsed the inside of the Bird’s Nest. Packed with 91,000 cheering fans in August, it will be quite a place. 

It was difficult to see too clearly today, though. It was not one of Beijing’s much vaunted “blue sky” days and the smog hung thickly.

There is still much work to be done. 

Pictures by David Gray. Also check out Liu Zhen’s feature.

On Wednesday, reporters will have a first chance to get inside the completed Bird’s Nest National Stadium, where some dreams will come true but many more will be dashed at the Olympics.

It’s been two years since I set foot in the stadium, which was then just a concrete bowl surrounding a muddy oval all shrouded in a twisting, dull, steel mesh.

Despite being so unique, it could be one of the last of a type.

Many people think that the era of the iconic Olympic stadium may soon be over.

Few bidding cities are able to justify building an arena capable of housing close on 100,000 spectators (91,000 in Beijing’s case) .

There is no doubt that the Bird’s Nest is an iconic structure and I am quite excited to get a first glimpse of it in its finished state.

At least, after the security checks being carried out on Monday (picture by a Reuters stringer), we know it should be safe.

Last week was a busy one in Beijing after events surrounding the torch relay took over the news agenda.

I spent six days in the bowels of a five-star hotel in central Beijing chasing comments from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge and his colleagues on events in London, Paris and San Francisco.

Unfortunately, the blog went into hibernation. But the glorious spring weather here has awoken the sleeping bears, and we’re clawing away at some interesting stuff for this week. 

Picture of Jacques Rogge at the China World Hotel by Alfred Cheng Jin

It arrived.

Some 5,000 VIPs, cheering workers and media gathered on Tiananmen Square on Monday to welcome the Beijing Olympic flame and launch the 137,000-km torch relay.

Predictably, security on the square was tight. 

The 600 reporters, photographers and television crews were bused from the Olympic media centre some four hours before the flame made an appearance.

As with all Chinese security checks, there were inconsistencies. The metal cigarette lighter in my pocket was confiscated, for example,  but the cheap plastic one in my bag made it through. Many of the security officials themselves were smoking, perhaps they got a light from the flame.

“This is normal, this happens in all countries,” said the policeman who insisted I give up the lighter.  

We sat in the spring sunshine waiting for the party to arrive from the airport, and for President Hu Jintao and the other top Communist Party officials to make their way across the road from their Zhongnanhai compound.

The song “One world, One dream” was played on loop to keep our spirits up as model workers and students in colour-coordinated uniforms waved red pom-poms and fans towards the huge portrait of Chairman Mao that overlooks the square.

Bored, I thought I would try and find out just how many security staff were involved in the operation.

“This is normal, this happens in all countries,” said the policeman I asked, echoing his colleague word-for-word and seeming to think I was challenging the legitimacy of the security operation.

I said that I understood that with China’s president due to arrive shortly, some kind of security was necessary. But how many people were involved?

“You can count them yourself,” he said with a shrug.  

The uninvited were kept at a distance, physically by cordons around the square and temporally by a one-minute delay on the television signal.

Hundreds had already gathered behind the cordons by the time the media arrived and thousands were still milling around when I left the square.  

The ceremony was spectacular. The acrobats and dancers were colourfully clothed and superbly drilled. The climax, when President Hu declared the torch relay open, was an explosion of confetti, doves and balloons.

It’s just a shame so few Chinese were able to witness it live. There was plenty of room. Take a look at our slide show.

Pictures of Hu Jintao, Liu Xiang and the Olympic flame and the climax of the ceremony by Claro Cortes IV.

In 2004, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao promised that the Beijing Olympics would be “smoke-free”.

So far, though, there has been no word on the rules and regulations that will prevent the world’s most enthusiastic smokers from puffing away while watching the Games this August.

There was brief flurry of excitement around the World Health Organisation’s World No Tobacco Day last May when some officials said the policy would be announced, but it never materialised. The rules, to be decided by the Beijing municipal government, are promsied soon.    

Some 320 million Chinese (and a few expat Westerners) draw on nearly 2 trillion cigarettes every year.

The offer and acceptance of cigarettes is a basic tenet of social and business interraction among men.

That is not just the case in rural China, where the men and women still often referred to as “peasants” might be forgiven for being ignorant of the health issues surrounding smoking.  

World and Olympic 110 metres hurdles champion Liu Xiang did promotional work for the Baisha Corporation, which sells 75 billion cigarettes a year.  

An executive with one of the top Games’ sponsors told me of a recent visit to the Olympic Tower, the sparkling headquarters of the Beijing organising commitee a couple of miles from the Bird’s Nest Stadium.

She was the only person among 20 or so at the meeting not puffing away, a scene unimaginable these days in large parts of the developed world.

But what is a non-smoking Olympics anyway?

Anyone who hates the very sight (or the merest whiff) of someone slowly killing themselves by cigarette might be disappointed by the laxity of the rules, if the experience of the 2004 Athens Olympics are anything to go by.

Greece has the highest number of smokers per capita in the world but its Games were also supposed to be non-smoking.  But smokers were able to idulge pretty much freely as long as they were not actually sitting in a seat at an Olympic venue. Pictures by Claro Cortes IV (top) and REUTERS/China Daily. 

London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s plan to send a red double decker bus from the host city of the 2012 Olympics toBeijing for this Summer’s Games has already come under fire for”wasting” a million dollars of taxpayers’ money.

Ok, Ken is in the middle of a mayoral election campaign so his every decision was always going to come under scrutiny from his rival and the British media.

But thoughts of the man they used to call “Red Ken”– and of British Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell– came to mind as 2008 Olympic chief Liu Qi presided over the meeting of the Beijing delegation at the National People’s Congress last Thursday.

The London Olympic organisers have already been subjected to a media storm of criticism over the Games’ budget and it is unlikelyto become any easier for them in the remaining 1635 days until the Olympic flame burns over London for the third time.

Watching Liu Qi in the Great Hall of the People on Thursday, I realised that in two years of reporting on the preparations for the Olympic Games, I had never seen him take so much as one question from the media.

As President of the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG), a former mayor and Communist Party boss of the host city, there would be no shortage of questions the growing band of reporters in Beijing would like to ask him. So far, though, he has kept his counsel.

Last Thursday was no different and it was left to BOCOG secretary general Wang Wei to tell the meeting that the operational budget for the Olympics would be revealed in May and that it is expected to be easily covered by the $1billion or so contribution from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Beijing’s own revenues from ticketing and marketing.

BOCOG officials have previously estimated that it would work out at about $2.1 billion and it wouldbe a huge surprise if it were to be much more than that.

(Before Londoners start scratching their heads in wonder at how Beijing could produce such fine venues and a wholesale upgrade of the city’s infrastructure for some $16 million less than London, this is just the operational budget and doesn’t include the estimated $40 billion the city is spending on new airport terminals, roads and subway lines.)

Whatever final figure emerges in May, it is almost certain that Liu Qi will not have to suffer the grilling from the media that Livingstone and Jowell are going through.  He’d have to talk to us first.

Photo of Liu Qi and Ken Livingstone in Beijing in 2006 by REUTERS/Peter Parks/Pool. London bus by Kieran Doherty.

This year it’s been impossible to move for articles and stories talking about how important the Beijing Olympics are to China.

On Wednesday, Premier Wen Jiabao gave his keynote speech to China’s annual session of parliament.

It took him two and a half hours to read the “Report on the work of the government” and the English transcript ran to 44 pages.

There were just two lines on the Olympics.

Photo of Wen Jiabao speaking to the National Parliament by Claro Cortes IV

Double Olympic champion diver Guo Jingjing was blasted by the Chinese media for snubbing the press last weekend.

Certainly, she was not on top form.

This was the full transcript of her encounter with the written media immediately after winning the gold medal in the synchronised 3 metre springboard , recorded and translated by my colleague Liu Zhen.

Q: Today the big crowds in this stadium are here to watch you dive. Did you feel any pressure in front of them?

A: No

Q: What happened to your nose?

A: Too dry, the climate.

Q: Please comment on your performance today.

A: Good. Feeling not bad.

Q: What are your expectations for the Olympics?

A: Try.

By contrast, the 13-year-old British prodigy Tom Daley may have been a novice but he took to the media work like, well,  a diver to water.  

He was, of course, on a high after qualifying to become Britain’s youngest Olympian and might be sick off it all by the time the London Olympics come round in 2012.

Should athletes always be expected to talk to the media?

I may be a little biased, but my view is an emphatic yes. 

If they take the benefits of the high media profile through lucrative sponsorships and endorsements then they owe it to the public to speak to the press.

Guo was certainly not shy about cashing in on her two gold medals in Athens. In fact she was banned from the diving team for a while for undertaking too many “commercial activities”.  

Having a microphone shoved in your face and being asked to explain your failure to win a gold medal may not be much fun, but it goes with the territory.

Picture of Guo Jingjing by REUTERS/Claro Cortes and Tom Daley by REUTERS/David Gray.

“The smile of our volunteers is Beijing’s best calling card,” Liu Qi, President of the Beijing Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (BOCOG),  August 2006. 

Given that Liu Qi is also the head of the Beijing Communist Party and a member of China’s Politburo, there was no doubt that this pithy phrase would not be forgotten in the training of the 100,000 volunteers for the Olympics and Paralympics.

Indeed, there is some evidence that officials have put a great deal of thought into what constitutes winning grinning.   

The perfect smile consists of “only showing the eight top teeth”, women being groomed to be medal presenters at August’s Games were being told at a camp at the Beijing Foreign Affairs School at the end of last year.

The good news for the majority of volunteers is that they will not be held to such exacting standards, according to the head of the Olympic and Paralympic volunteer programme, Liu Jian. 

“We say if you want to show your kindness and goodwill to others, show your seven and half teeth to them,” he said last month.

So there you have it. Half a tooth, the difference between a warm welcome and a world class smile.

Picture: BOCOG  vice president Wang Wei gives it the full eight teeth (by Grace Liang/Reuters)For more on the volunteer training programme, check out Liu Zhen’s feature on a Beijing boot camp. It doesn’t sound like much fun.