This weekend, Beijing inaugurated the new Bird’s Nest Stadium with the “Good Luck Beijing” track and field event. I attended less than 24 hours after covering the earthquake in Sichuan, and the contrast between sports and rubble was a little hard to digest.

The Bird’s Nest stadium, built for the Olympics, can seat 91,000 fans. The air flows through well, keeping it cool in the muggy Beijing summer. The seats are well-positioned, so the contestants can be seen easily. The screens are visible, the sound-system clear, the lighting strong but not harsh.

The Mianyang stadium, in Sichuan, is currently housing nearly 20,000 refugees. Every railing is covered in clothing, the floors covered in cardboard and quilts. The glassed-in second story helps shield old people and children from the rain. The screens are tuned to television coverage of the disaster and the PA system booms out the radio news.

Lucky Beijing, Unlucky Sichuan.

But the two stadiums have some things in common.

A small army of young volunteers works in each. Fresh faced volunteers in Beijing answered the call to help China’s Olympics make a shining impression on the world. Masked volunteers in Mianyang answered the call to serve fellow Chinese in an hour of need.

Lines for snack food in Beijing’s stadium are polite and orderly, in line with campaigns for “cultured queuing.”

Lines for food in Mianyang are also polite and orderly, but a lot longer, as refugees show enormous patience despite hunger and grief.

Taxis pull over on the road outside the Bird’s Nest, so that people can take photos of themselves in front of the Olympic icon.

Cars pull over on the road outside the Mianyang station, to drop off donations of clothing and water.

Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought the applause of the Beijing crowd got a little warmer when the blue-suited Sichuan contestants won.

Pictures of scenes from Mianyang Stadium by Jianan Yu, Bird’s Nest by David Gray

Watching athletics at the“Bird’s Nest” National Stadium is a dream for many Chinese people but it turned into nightmare for me last weekend.

We set off last Friday to see the titanic building and a relatively low-key athletics meeting mainly contested by young Chinese athletes.

There were, however, still tens of thousands of people at the showpiece venue for Beijing Olympics, most of whom were looking forward to a first glimpse inside the stadium and to watching their hero Liu Xiang in action.

But our passions gradually died long before we entered the Bird’s Nest.

It took us nearly one and a half hours from seeing the stadium from the road to actually getting anywhere near it.

Every junction was gridlocked and we had to drive another 3 kms further down the fourth ring road, which runs alongside the Olympic Green, to find a place to turn around.

Twenty minutes later, we reached an entrance of the stadium only to find that there was no parking lot.

“Go! Go straight!” one cop shouted to us at a crossroads. Several more shouted the same phrase at us as we continued and we drove more than 2 km more before finally parking our car in a temporary “car park” on the curb as the cops directed.

From there it should have been 15 minutes walk to our destination but we were not that lucky. Heading back to the entrance we had past earlier, we found chaos with hundreds of people milling around.

“Closed! Closed! There are too many people! We can’t bear it!” one officials shouted. “We will take you to another entrance soon, by free bus!”

Less than a minute later, an empty bus arrived but there was only room to take a very small portion of the anxious crowd. The others stood in lines, waiting for another bus.

Officials, police and volunteers shouted through loudspeakers, asking people to keep calm and orderly.

But they seemed incredibly anxious themselves, as if they were surprised to see so many people. All this with a crowd of only about 30,000 making its way into the 91,000-seater stadium.

“I can’t imagine what will happen here when the Olympic Games come,” said one man standing close to me. “They should be prepared for the event better than this.”

At one stage, some people behind us in the queue suddenly ran back to the gate, saying that it had been re-opened. We decided to wait on.

The second bus came ten minutes later and took us by a circuitous route to another gate on the opposite side of the stadium.

From there it was another 15-minute walk, through at least three security checkpoints, before reached the Bird’s Nest at last.

It was 8:30pm by then, one and a half hours after the action had started.

Another curious thing happened in the stadium when the athletes were being introduced.

“Lane one…” the announcer said. “From China!” (who?)

“Lane two…from China!” (who? again)

“Lane three…from China!”

Oh God, I know we Chinese don’t have lots of good runners besides Liu, but they could have found a list of their names.

Pictures by David Gray 

Liu Xiang, China’s top athlete, was the undoubted star of the show at the China Open Beijing Olympic test event at the Bird’s Nest last weekend and cruised to an easy victory over a weak field in the 110 metres hurdles.

Such is the national obession with his retaining his Olympic title in August, though, that two false starts in three days caused some consternation among his many fans.

Liu’s coach, Sun Haiping, blamed the Chinese characteristics of the starting pistol. The world record holder himself, while conceding his premature getaway in Saturday’s final was a mistake, had a more simple explanation for his yellow card on Friday.

“I deliberately made the false start in the semi-final in order to have a bit of fun,” he said after the final.

If you’re a multimillionaire athlete who can’t go out to shop or eat in a restaurant in your own country for fear of being mobbed by adoring fans, I guess you have to take your amusements where you find them.

The 24-year-old does have a good sense of humour but that might not be the beginning and end of it all.   

Liu’s slender build puts him at a disadvantage against his more powerful rivals over the first few metres of a race, a disadvantage his superior hurdling technique enables him to overcome over the full 110 metres.

If you bear in mind that the IAAF rules punish a second false start in any one race with disqualification, regardless of who jumped the gun the first time, it might not be the worst thing for a poor starter to do to keep his rivals on their toes.  

Picture by David Gray

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.