Changing China

900 days on, my Games begin

I’d like to write that when I first arrived in Beijing on that freezing February morning in 2006, I spied, through the gloom and smog, the number 900 on the Olympic countdown clock that sits beside the airport highway.

I can’t do that, sadly — I don’t remember it, and I’m not even sure the countdown clocks were up by then — but that is, by my calculation, what it would have read on my first day in China.

This morning I did see a clock and it read zero. In the intervening two-and-a-half years I have lived and breathed the Beijing Olympics and must have written today’s date, the eighth of the eighth 2008, hundreds of times.

I remember the 800 day countdown very well. I had gone to Jingsong No.4 School in central Beijing to write a story about the Olympic education programme.

Rather than the quick tour of a classroom and chat with a few children, however, I found myself seated on a platform alongside the local dignitaries and Olympic badminton silver medallist Dong Jiong as the whole school performed Olympic-themed activities in front of us.

As one of the “honoured guests”, I then had to walk across the stage and place a crepe ribbon on a big cardboard cut-out of the numbers 8-0-0.

The 700, 600, 500, and 400 countdowns must have been marked but I can’t remember how.